FC4 doesn't show all hard drives in Computer

thomasfingram · 08-14-2005, 09:37 AM

I have two hard drives, hda and hdb. hda is 14.3GB, it mounts at /, and I have everything on (minus a small partition for swap). hdb is 80GB and is about 80% full. It is a NTFS drive, and contains a ton of media and personal files. (I recently [a few days ago] defected from Windows.) Anyhow Fedora is not mounting it or even showing it anywhere as a mountable device. How can I change that? Ideally I would even be able to write to hdb, but I would at least like to have read access to those files. Please help!

david_ross · 08-14-2005, 09:47 AM

Take a look at linux-ntfs:
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/

NTFS write support insn't totally stable yet so I would recomend using a native linux filesystem or vfat/fat32 if you need to share it localy with windows.

thomasfingram · 08-14-2005, 10:17 AM

Oh I'm not sharing hdb with Windows; I'm a Linux man all the way now! My question was mainly concerned with why Fedora wouldn't show me the NTFS drive at all, like it doesn't exist. I'll check out the link and see what that has to say. Thank you.

david_ross · 08-14-2005, 10:32 AM

It should show the drive/partition table if you run:
fdisk -l

If not - what type of drive is it and how is it connected?

thomasfingram · 08-14-2005, 10:33 PM

I ran that command and it returned the following error:

Code:

bash: fdisk: command not found

At any rate both drives are standard PATA drives. hda is primary master, and hdb is primary slave. Do I have to enter something in to fstab or what? Btw as soon as I can afford it, I'm going to buy a huge hard drive and copy everything over to it. Thanks for your help.

PS David what does the command in your signiture do? Just curious...

BiPolar · 08-14-2005, 11:07 PM

just so you know, ntfs really is just barely supported in linux. the ntfs driver will allow you to view and access files on ntfs partitions, but you can not alter them or write to the drive. In addition, once you have the ntfs driver, permissions need to be changed on the drive so that non-root users can access it. If you're going linux all the way, then when you get the new drive format it for linux, otherwise you can use Fat32, but then you have all of the issues that fat32 drives entail.

thomasfingram · 08-15-2005, 01:22 AM

I know how little supported NTFS is when it comes to Linux. Does anybody know how to auto-mount an NTFS drive in Fedora Core 4?

Thank you in advance.

UsrnameThatsNotInUse · 08-15-2005, 02:42 AM

As david_ross already told, http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ is everything you will need to mount or automount ntfs in FC4
However if you have done your yum config as they told at http://www.fedorafaq.org/ you can do this and your system will support NTFS.

First you have to become root

Code:

su -

Then install ntfs kernel module (You have to do this every time you update your kernel)

Code:

yum install kernel-module-ntfs-$(uname -r)

Then you can check if ntfs drive really is there

Code:

/sbin/fdisk -l

then pick the device you want to mount and do

Code:

This will create a folder for you to mount a device and then mounts the device /dev/hda1 to it. 
(Just replace /dev/hda1 with the device you are mounting)

mkdir /mnt/ntfs
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfs -t ntfs -r -o umask=0222

If you are happy with the results then you can add the command to the /etc/fstab to get linux mount the drive automatically at boot.

If your manual mount command is
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfs -t ntfs -r -o umask=0222

just add following line into fstab file and it is done
/dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfs ntfs ro,umask=0222 0 0

If I remember right fstab file shoud end with an enter, so please press enter after that line.

duffers20 · 09-23-2005, 09:03 AM

Thanks for the information editing the fstab file, I had the mounting working, it just wouldn't remember them, have been looking for a solution to this for a while now. Thanks again!