I'm dual booting Red Hat 7.1 and Win2k, and I want to be able to see the stuff on the Win2k partition (actually a separate hard drive, but that should matter). The Win2k drive is NTFS and I have been told that in order to mount ntfs that I would have to recompile the kernel with a module that allows it to read ntfs (read-only btw). Is there any truth to this? And, what do I have to do to accomplish that task if it is indeed necessary?

Also, I can't seem to mount any of the floppies I have made in Win2k. I believe that even Win2k floppies are still in a FAT format of some kind but I can't seem to mount them with "mnt -f vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy" or "mnt -f msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy" . Is my drive just acting up or is there something I'm supposed to be doing that I'm not doing? As far as I know its just a normal TEAC floppy drive.

Thanks for the help, I definitely need it!

yes, it is true.

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And, what do I have to do to accomplish that task if it is indeed necessary?

compile it. check the linuxdoc.org for details

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Also, I can't seem to mount any of the floppies I have made in Win2k. I believe that even Win2k floppies are still in a FAT format of some kind but I can't seem to mount them with "mnt -f vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy" or "mnt -f msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy" . Is my drive just acting up or is there something I'm supposed to be doing that I'm not doing? As far as I know its just a normal TEAC floppy drive. Thanks for the help, I definitely need it!

try mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy or use the man page to check for the right options to use.

i have a question about NFTS

i 'm gonna install mand8.2 for my friend..
he has winXP on NTFS by the way

instead of recompiling kernel..
can i give an option to include proper module for the purpose
at installation time?

thank you..

I run Mandy, and I do not believe that it has that option. You will have to go to the sourceforge website and download the NTFS driver, then recompile the kernel after installation.

or install SuSE which has support included by default

Or go ahead and install Mandy 8.2 because it has it by default as well.

OK, I want to set some things straight here:

By default, Linux allows read-only access to the NTFS partitions (and only root can read it, unless you explicitly specify otherwise in /etc/fstab or at mount time). Most distros support this out of the box.

To get read-write access (which is experimental and requires a chkdsk after each mount), you'll have to recompile the ntfs.o module with the read-write access option. Basically, you'll have to recompile the kernel.

Finally, a pearl of wisdon: if you don't need NTFS, don't use it. Especially at home, I fail to see how you can benefit from NTFS. FAT32 should be good enough for most people... unless you work with files more than 4 GB in size, which I doubt. My friend ended up in a pretty sh!tty situation after Windoze 2000 crapped out on him with a STOP error at boot time. We've tried everything, the recovery console, installing Win2k and XP over his hard drive without formatting, but nothing worked. Finally, I just lost my patience and fired up DemoLinux copying all his files over to another hard drive formatted with FAT32, installed XP on his messed up partition (this time formatting it with FAT32), and everyone was happy.

I still don't understand why MS doesn't go with a SMART filesystem, instead of crappy FAT or NTFS?

is there any way to conert a filesystem from NTFS to FAT without data loss?

sewer_monkey nailed it.

I don't understand why there's a tendency that some of the experienced here tells the inexperienced to recompile kernel, which is a daunting task to say the least for the newbies, when all they want would be just copying a wallpaper or Word doc.

That the latter is read-only issue. All distros I used had built-in support for this.

The more desireable approach to file management is to have TWO or more partition for ONE OS. In the case of this thread starter, you would be best off having NTFS, I know it's choice for the security-concisous, for the OS and a seperate FAT32 for files.

10gb, ntfs, w2k/xp
5gb, fat32, d:/my doc
5gb, ext2, linux

Almost all places I worked at used a similar approach: multiple partitions on a computer. So when you decide to start over or something is messed up, no sweat, install away! And yes! You can save Linux files on FAT32.