Hi,

I'm fairly new to linux and have just installed debian on my primary partition, however would like to access file on my ntfs secondary partition. I have WINE installed but understand that I need to recompile the kernel with the apropriate source module. So far I have downloaded the 'linux-2.4.26-ntfs-2.1.6b.patch' and have extracted it in my home folder. Also have downloaded kernel-source using apt-get and also installed kdb debug program incs I run into problems. However my knowledge of linux is limited and feel I'm in a bit over my head from here so would appreciate if someone could tell me where to go from here or point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance,

Scotty b

if you installed the stock debian sarge kernel.all you need to do is mount the ntfs partition...

at root at the following to /etc/fstab

of course you must make to appropriate changes for you system as well as create a directory ffor this partition with mkdir

Hmm Ok still need some help though, need things described in detail, still a bit shadey.

Now I've accessed the fstab in /etc/
and added the code above at the end of the doc, and created a new dir called 'ntfs' in /mnt/

What does that code actually do?
What do I have to do now?

Sorry but my knowledge is fairly limited.
Cheers for your patience.

Just to clarify, you need to change Y to the device name of your ntfs partition (ie. hdb1 or something like that) and you need to change X to the name of the directory that you created for mounting the partition. This is just telling the computer where you want to mount the windows partition and with what options. In the case of ntfs it will be read only. There is limited support for ntfs write, but you may have to recompile the kernel for this and it can be dangerous (may cause problems with your ntfs partition).

Then you just mount it
Also note that both windows and linux can read/write to fat partitions, so this may be another option for you. But if everything is already set up with ntfs, it could be hard to add a fat partition now.

The kernels provided by Debian have read-only NTFS support present through the ntfs module.

As for the configuration in /etc/fstab regarding the mounting, the fields on the line are separated by whitespace (spaces, tabs) and have the following meaning:
The first field is the device name of the partition containing the NTFS filesystem you want to mount
The second field is the mount point - where you want it to be mounted.
The third field is what kind of filesystem it is that you want to mount, in this case NTFS which is specified as ntfs.
The fourth field is various mount options that can be specified.
The fifth parameter has to do with backups of ext2 filesystems. Just leave it at zero.
The sixth parameter has to do with order of filesystem checking. For these kinds of partitions it is common to leave it as a zero as well.

The mount point directories must exist prior to mounting.

The entries in /etc/fstab (that aren't marked noauto) are mounted at system bootup.
If you want to mount all filesystems specified in /etc/fstab (that aren't marked noauto), after boot (e.g. when just having edited /etc/fstab) you can do so by mount -a




Example from one of my systems: /dev/hda5 is a partition containing an NTFS filesystem that is mounted on /mnt/win2k
/dev/hda6 is a partition containing an NTFS filesystem that is mounted on /mnt/winxp

As for the options, they are set as read-only (ro) although this driver does not even support write operations in the first place, and the owner of all files and directories is root (uid=0), and the group of all files and directories is staff (gid=50) and the permissions on all files and directories is set to 775 (umask=002) but actually due to the read-only nature the umask effectively becomes 222 (permissions of 555).

Hmm, well thanks people.
Your answers have made me have a big reconsideration.
My problem is that I need windows to run certain programs that are unmatched by any I have seen on Linux, for instance Photoshop and Flash, (I don't believe the GImp performs as well as Photoshop after seeing some results). However do want to ditch most of Windows as it always crashes and is resource hungry. I have two machines, a small old one I intended to set up as a linux web server, that I could remotely connect to with my top spec pc also running Debian (love the community idea) and have windows running in a window running my design software. Now I'm beginning to see how this may be harder than I first thaught, unless I step back onto Fat32 with a complete reinstall, what's your opinion may I ask, or have I gone too far of topic?