i just recently installed SUSE 9.2 Pro and i have 2 other hard drives in my computer, when i go to drives it has windows (/dev/hdb1) and Windows (/dev/hde1) i formated them a while back and there is nothing on them... when i tryed to put some files on each one of them i got this error it could not add content, also i tried to set the permissions to read and write and i got this error "Changing the attributes of files is not supported with protocol drives." so i was woundering if i need to format them some way... thanks

Are these windows partitions ntfs or vfat?

How are you going about reading the partitions? (mount -t ntfs /dev/hdb1 /mnt/windrive ls /mnt/windrive?)

What exactly does the error message say - quote it as it is written.
Simon

Moved: This thread is more suitable in SuSE/Novell and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

they are in NTFS
and the errors that i get when i try to change the permissions is : "Changing the attributes of files is not supported with protocol drives."

when i try to add a new folder this is the error that i get "Could not make folder /windows/E/mp3s"

thanks
mike

I THINK......the drive you removed Windows and it's files from needs to be re-formatted to a linux partition.

Don't quote me on this, but I don't think Suse can write to an NTFS formatted partition. Is that what you're trying to do? You can read from an NTFS partition...I did this just last night. If you want write permissions to your Windows partitions, you need to reformat them as FAT32.

http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2004/0...a_91_ntfs.html

suse says writing on ntfs is bad.......

ok thanks alot everyone has been really helpfull :-) i just got one more question.... im in the Yast Control center and i clikc on partitions and i have these drives that are the windows ones that i was talking about.... HDE1 and HDB1.... HDE1 is 114.4 GB and HDB1 is 12.7 GB... i was woundering how do i format them.... do i need to change the cylender start or end point.. or can i just format them completely... thats what i dont get....

thanks
mike

I assume you have a dual boot with Suse and Windows. Are any of the drives you wish to format the main Windows C/System drive? You mentioned you have nothing on the partitions you wish to reformat, so I am assuming no. If this is the case, then simply boot into Windows and reformat the two partitions as FAT32 and you're done. Actually, you will have to divide the 114 GB NTFS partition into smaller FAT32 partitions...the maximum size of a FAT32 partition is around 30+ GB. If you do not have a dual boot setup, then why not reformat them as Linux ext3, Reiser, or something. NTFS formatted drives are useless to the Linux OS, unless there is data on them from a Windows/Linux dual boot setup. If this is the option you want, see here. I have never used YaST to partition a drive...fdisk does the job fine.

thank you very much buldir it was very helpfull

My pleasure!

i have 4 250GB NTFS hard drives full of files that i need to be able to change the permissions of the drives i get the same message reformating is not a option "Changeing the attributes of files is not supported with protocol drives"

can any one please tell how i can do this

And the answer is exactly the same: you can't.

You can read NTFS partitions but you cannot (CANNOT) write to them. This is why I asked if the partitions were NTFS in my initial reply. I don't think that ntfs even supports UNIX file permissions. Do this: burn the files you need to a CD/DVD ROM - reformat your windows drives to ext3 or fat32 - put those files you need back into the (reformatted) drives.

Q. How do you get Windows to run faster
A. Throw it harder

Simon

Regarding writing to NTFS partitions, there are some options other than simply, "No, it can't be done".
I personally don't use NTFS for sharing, but here are some solutions I have found along the way:

Payware Driver
http://www.ntfs-linux.com/

Free "Workaround"
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/in...#3.2workaround

Quite:
The "workaround" at Source Forge basically says "it can't be done" adding "yet" on to the end of that sentence. Then goes on to suggest using windows to manipulate ntfs partitions.

The Payware driver is called "NTFS for Linux" by Paragon and comes for around 70 Euros. It's read ability is slower than the native ntfs driver - though it does, indeed, write to ntfs partitions. It does this by using MS software as part of the package and it is designed for use with dual-boot systems. You must have a valid XP licence to use it.

You missed out the GPL competitor "Captive"

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

which uses wine - and thus you still need windows dll files at least. It is even slower than the aragon offering, and may corrupt the native read process.

Neither captive nor NTFS for Linux will decrypt ntft encrypted files and both have very poor performance with large files (>100Mb say) but is quit good for, say, text files and wordproc docs.

I still maintain that, with this expencive and problematical performance, one is better using windows to write to ntfs.

Thanks.