How would one go about mounting NTFS partitions on Slackware 8.1?

I've tried sticking in entries into /etc/fstab to no avail.

TheMad

Do you have the partitoins on the same machine, or are they on a network?

Same machine. Different hard drives, though (well, 2/3 of them are, at least).

TheMad

I think you should do something like this:
mount -t ntfs /dev/"the name of the partition ex. hdb1" /"where you like to mount it"

I´m not realy shure about the syntax, so check out the man pages for mount (man mount).
You have to tell Slack what filesystem you wants to mount, the path to the partiton and where you want to mount it.

If you can mount it manually, you can start editing your fstab-file to get it to mount automatically. You use about the same syntax in the fstab as when you mount it manually. Again - check the man pages.

mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/ddrive

or to make it permenant, put an entry in fstab:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/ddrive ntfs defaults 0 0

use the appropriate drive and partition for your box and make sure the mount point exists (usually as an empty directory) before you mount it.

ntfs filesystem support is a module in the kernel, if you don't have it then you have to build a custom kernel.

Slackware (at least version 8.1) provides an NTFS module right out of the box (which I find surprising considering it's still an experimental feature). Typing modprobe ntfs as root will activate it on a per session basis, you can enable it every time you boot by uncommenting the ntfs line in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules (did I get it right this time? ).

It is still read only, odd that it's an included module but maybe Slackware just throws modules for everything in as default. Also, the modprobe ntfs should be optional since it is supposed to autoload when you try to use it with the mount command (my box did that.)

Many thanks. I've got them mounted now and whatnot. One last question, though. How do I make it so that all users can access the mounted partitions? At the end of the line in /etc/fstab/ there are two numbers which I simply set to 0 0. However, I can only access the partitions as root, which is not optimal. Thanks again.

TheMad

In the fstab, change the field (the 4th field) "default" to e.g. umask=22.

Old entry:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/ddrive ntfs defaults 0 0

New entry:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/ddrive ntfs umask=22 0 0

You may also set the owner and group with uid and gid options, like:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/ddrive ntfs uid=joe,group=users,umask=22 0 0

I also recomend you to make sure it's mounted read-only with the ro option like:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/ddrive ntfs ro,uid=joe,group=users,umask=22 0 0

For details, see Documentation/filesystems/ntfs.txt in the Linux source directory.