Hello,
i'm using FC 5 distribution. I hav a 80GB Seagate SATA Drive most of which is formatted under windows XP. I've loaded and successfully installed required ntfs drivers for my distro. fdisk -l displays my disks as sda1, sda2, sda3, sda4, and sda5. cat /proc/filesystems displays ntfs in supported disk formats... but when i use the command for mounting:

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows -t ntfs -r
the terminal displays:
/dev/sda1 is not a valid block device.

tried the same with other partitions as well but get the same error.

Under LVM i can see all of my partitions as uninitialized partitions.

I've searched through a lot of threads but haven't come up with any solution..!!.

so HELP ME...!!!!

regards

Sorry.. Getting the same error with this command as well...!!!

What shud i do now...???

Post the results of fdisk -l as shown in terminal, so that we can see for ourselves what the facts are.

Here's the output of fdisk:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1147 9213246 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 1148 9729 68934915 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 1148 2039 7164958+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 2040 3314 10241406 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda7 3315 4590 10249438+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda8 4591 8709 33085836 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda9 8710 9729 8193118+ 83 Linux


Got any clue???...

i'm eagerly waitin' for the day when i'll be able to open my files in linux w/o first goin to windows copying them to usb and rebooting linux again..!!

what happens if you mount -t ntfs /dev/sda6 /your/mountpoint
and are you sure that you've ntfs kmod installed?

regards

with -t ntfs /dev/sda6 (mount point) ...... i get the same error.
/dev/sda6 is not a valid block device.

and yea.. i've counterchkd. that ntfs kernel module is installed on my Distribution... when i try to reinstall it says same version is already installed on my system....

don't know where the problem lies...!!

ls -al sd* within /dev
Check if the device file exists what it automatically should ...
and maybe something is wrong with your bios settings.

I have the same problem with fc6. I tried to use the 3rd generation ntfs driver (that didn't work because of some bug with SElinux) then I tried the driver from linux-ntfs.org (it also didn't work because it would just say "mount: unknown filesystem type 'ntfs'") then I installed the NTFS support with linva rpm and now it says "Error:/dev/sdb1 is not a valid block device".

So instead of getting rid of my errors completely I just replace them with new ones, gotta love it!! I've seen this problem all over the internet in regards to FC. Everyone has opinions but no one as yet has a definitive answer. Indeed I'm beginning to wonder weather it is possible at all to mount a NTFS file system read only or not. If anyone has an answer I'd kill to find out how you did it.

Yes the sda* drives are shown in the /dev/ path...
I've come across another scenario... during my experimentations... i thot there was some problem with my SATA Drive so i got another disk from my friend and installed it in parallel with my hard disk.. Now FC made my disk sdb* and my friends' disk sda*... when i ran the same command with sda* replaced with sdb*.. all of my drives got successfully mounted... but when i tried to mount my friends' drive which was assigned sda* it gave same error... now when i removed my friends' drive my drive was again assigned sda* and when i repeated the same command with sda* same error started to appear again...
I don't know if there is some problem with sda* assignment of the drives... is there any way i can chk. that ???? or any way i can mention something somewhere so that FC picks my drives as sdb*...???
Or anyother conclusion could be that u can only mount one of the ntfs drives when you have two SATA drives installed..?? is that possible.....??