hello All,

I have been trying to mount a scsi harddrive which has ntfs filesystem and I am having very little success. I am the neebieist newbie you could imagine.

I get to a point were on giving the mount command with the address of the disk and were it should be mounted I get an error stating it can't be found in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

Could anyone help please.

Colpe

Why have you posted this message multiple times? Have you not read the forum rules?

Sorry about that.
I wasn't sure which category my question was most suited.
Being a newbie and it being a hardware problem I was confused.

Sorry

Colpe

From the other thread:

Have you added an entry for this drive to /etc/fstab, as the error states?

Thank you Matir for the reply.

If I understand you right no I haven't entered the drive in etc/fstab.
How would one do such an entery command?

colpe


p.s to all the members who took offense to my niave disregard for the posting
rules , I am sorry and it will not happen again.

No worries, just trying to stop you doing it in the future

/etc/fstab is a file that contains bit's of information that inform your operating system what drives to mount, what file system to use and various options. Part of my /etc/fstab is listed below:

This file is structured like so:

[device] [mount point] [file system] [options] [dump] [pass]

An scsi hard disk will normally be /dev/sda (if it is the primary, if it is secondary it will be /dev/sdb). If the scsi is one big partition, then you could just use:

As root, you can insert this data using a text editor like nano, vim or emacs, or you could just use the echo command like so:

the >> means redirect the output into the end of /etc/fstab (a single > will make the contents of the file the output of echo, so make sure you use two >'s). mount -a mount's all the devices listed in /etc/fstab, so if you don't get any error's when you execute this command, then you are good to go! Make sure that you mount to a real location, i.e. make the directory /mnt/windows, or replace /mnt/windows above accordingly.

Side note, Linux does not fully support ntfs, as it is a proprietary file system made by Microsoft. Mounting an ntfs partition is not recommended, as Linux can corrupt the data in the ntfs filesystem.

Thank you tomj88,

I got alot out of that explaination.
Although on implementation of the first code dev/sdb1 mnt/windows ntfs noatime 0 0
I am been denied Permission. I am logged in as root so i wonder why has dash denied me permission?

colpe

Thank you tomj88,

I got alot out of that explaination.
Although on implementation of the first code dev/sdb1 mnt/windows ntfs noatime 0 0
I am been denied Permission. I am logged in as root so i wonder why has dash denied me permission?

I should also say that I am trying to save some important files on the scsi so a reinstallation of win os on the computer where the scsi disk came from can be done.

I am trying to use my linux (fedora 4) computer to mount the disk in order to save the files temporarily.


colpe

thanks to all contributions but I think its a lost battle.

Some research has thrown light on the file lock ntfs have when transit,
basically it is entrenched in windows os.

I will have to bite the bullet and loose the files.

colpe

You should be able to read, though not write, ntfs filesystems without a problem. Can you post your current /etc/fstab?

Everything got screwed up today. After realising the difficulty with accessing the disk I brought it back into the
windows hoping I could do something there. Well that just lead to more problems. I had bios problem and the disk didn't want to start the os. Maybe my attempts to mount the disk from the linux machine left its mark some how.

Well because of newbieness and complete lack of know-how I choose to format the disk and re install win 2000.


Thank you for helping in any case.
I think I will need to sharpen my linux before I attempt any other installs.

all the best
colpe

It is a SCSI, right? Among other things this means you have to set ID and termination properly, and still it is not guaranteed to work with a SCSI controller it was not formatted with.

SCSI devices are not guaranteed to work with other controllers? Seriously?

Yes, it was quite a long time ago I learned it, but... I think things are like that:
Unlike IDE disks SCSI disks do not have built-in controllers. (IDE controllers are built into disks and the thing on the m/b is barely providing the IDE interface and shouldn't be called controller). Now, since disk access is up to controller - which is an external unit - and there are no standards how exactly controller must treat the disk, the compatibility is not guaranteed.
I realize of course my explanation is oversimplified, here is more!

Interesting. Though, according to that, it appears as though the incompatibility standard is more or less left to SCSI-1 and somewhat SCSI-2. Newer devices should work together.

In that way, ATA is very much superior. The intricacies of the hardware on a given disk should NOT be handled by the "controller" (that is, motherboard or PCI controller). Each device should consistently respond to commands regardless of environment.

Though I do have to say... SATA2 with NCQ... drool.