I just installed one of these NTFS progs and can read my WinXP NTFS drive. I know that if I also write to the disk, there is a chance I could corrupt the disk / some files. So, I am not going to chance writing to it.

My second hard drive is FAT32, and so I had a question about mounting and accessing it. Basically, can I read it without having to worry about corrupting anything, right? How about writing to it? I definitely don't want to take any chances....I saw the mounting commands somewhere online, so I guess I don't need to install anything extra in Linux for this (like I did for NTFS support)? BTW, I have Fedora Core 3.

Any info on this is appreciated!!

Thanks!!

You can safely write to FAT32.

as long as you have a current kernel, read/write on fat32 is enabled and works fine

You might want to note that in linux it will be refered to as vfat and not fat32.

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Ok cool, thanks for the responses. However when I tried to mount it, I get a "Permission Denied" for the drive (bash: /dev/hdc5: Permission denied) - I was trying to mount the FAT32 not the "Ext'd", by doing: "/dev/hdc5 /mnt/D" . What am I doing wrong?

Thanks a lot!!

What do you mean by doing "/dev/hdc5 /mnt/D"

If you do not have an entry in the /etc/fstab file then you need to log in as root. The command is
mount -t vfat /dev/hdc5 /mnt/D.

The fstab entry should be:
/dev/hdc5 /mnt/D vfat users,umask=000 0 0

All users will have read / write permissions.

It is possible to write to NTFS with a module called captive-ntfs. Yow will need a few files from Windows 2000/XP to make it work. It will not mess up the NTFS module that is already compiled and you do not have to remove it.

FAT does not have the same permissions as Linux so you can only set permission once during mounting and it will use the same permission for every file and directory on the FAT partition.

Hi thanks everyone for the help with the FAT32, my syntax was wrong when I was trying to mount my drive. As for the NTFS, I will probably keep it read only since making it write enabled seems like it would be a bit of a challenge for me right now.. Thanks for the info though, once I get more comfortable with Linux, maybe in a few months, I'll give it a try.

Thanks!!

Hi! First, thanks again to everyone for the help.

Ok, so now I'm thinking about installing Wine and also the Captive NTFS program. My question is, are there any risks I'm taking with this? I mean, is it pretty much known to be stable, or am I taking my life into my hands?

I did see a post about a workaround if I'm running SP2, as Captive doesn't work out of the box with SP2, so....

Can you tell I'm making some progress with my Linux knowledge?