Newbie - multi-OS drive sharing trouble
 

Hi all,

Sorry if the following seem very obvious - I am a total newbie! I am running a triple boot system (2 x Windows XP, 1 x SuSE 9.2). My 2 hard drives are partitioned as follows:

Hard Disk 1
1 - Windows OS1 (primary)
2 - Windows OS2 (primary)
3 - Linux swap drive (logical)
4 - SuSE Linux 9.2 OS (logical)
5 - general data partition (logical)
all partitions FAT32

Hard Disk 2
1 - general data drive (NTFS)

I've managed to set up the multi-boot fine, using Boot Magic as my boot loader. The problems I am having are:

1. I added partition 5 on Disk 1 AFTER I had installed all the OSs. I used Partition Magic in Windows to create it. The two Windows OSs can see it fine. SuSE however does not see it at all. How do I get SuSE to see it? I am wanting it to be a shared data drive between all my OSs.

2. In SuSE I am having big trouble writing files to either of the Windows OS drives. This is a big problem because ultimately I want to set up Thunderbird to share my email between Windows OS1 and SuSE. How do I enable SuSE to write to these drives? Will I have the same problem writing to my shared data drive once I have enabled SuSE to see it?

3. I am also unable to write to Hard Disk 2 from Linux, it's read-only. I know this is because it is NTFS. Is there any way of converting an NTFS partition to FAT32 without losing all the data?

4. On an unrelated topic, I am having trouble installing new software in Linux. I have been trying to install the CrossOver 3.1 demo (hopefully to use iTunes in Linux). I downloaded the installer file OK, and have just about worked out how to run it from a terminal (intuitive - NOT). However, I keep getting 'permission denied' messages when I run it.

I am wondering whether the initial SuSE setup has a lot of restrictions as to what you can and can't write to and whether this is the source of my problems. Hope you can all help - I'm liking this Linux thing but I have to say it's not an easy system for a newbie! Any advice in real basic 'open menu x...click on button y'-style would be so appreciated

you need to add an entry in /etc/fstab, such as i'm assuming that your extended partition is hda4, and that makes the 3rd logical, hda7... use "fdisk -l" to see if it actaully IS hda7...

I wonder why you do not have more trouble. FAT32 is not a recommended format for Linux, since it does not know Unix permissions. These permissions can only be set system (or partition wide) using the umask parameter. This may cause the access problem. In /etc/fstab, the option umask=000 should be set to allow all users full access.