Accessing Windows Partition
 

Newbie here!

I dont expect any quick solutions as there aren't any, especially in the Linux world ;) but basically can someone give me a brief overview of the things that need to be done so I can see the files in my windows partition (i have windows and mandrake installed on different partitions). It would be very useful to me if i could do this, make things easier.

So erm... can anyone point me in the right direction :D (hope im not asking a stupid question :confused: )

:newbie:

Hello

First, we need to know on which device your windows is. You can find that out by typing (assuming you have one partioned ide disk):

fdisk -l /dev/hda

On my system it responds:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 634 5092573 b Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda2 635 1584 7624509 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 635 776 1140583 6 FAT16
etc...

Now, /dev/hda5 is my "D" drive in Win.

When I wan t o access it under Linux, I mount it by typing:

mount -t vfat /dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d

Of course, /mnt/win_d has to be created before that.

Since in Linux everything is a directory, you can see your files in the directory /mnt/win_d or whatever you want to call it.

If everything works fine you can add a line like this to /etc/fstab:

/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat noauto,user 0 0

Also, type man mount for more information.

Bye

Koen Plessers

sorry but where exactly do i type all of this :confused: in what program ???

actually, your win partitions should be in your /mnt directory. It's probably called win_c. In linux, drives appear as directories.

wowy ;)

thx for that, but how can i write files back to the drive, it says i dont have the rights to save a file back to the windows drive :confused:

Hi,

I am accessing my Windows partition through Linux RedHat 9.0 in following way:

1) change to /mnt directory and make a directory
cd /mnt
mkdir winshare

2) open /etc/fstab using a text editor and add the below line (My windows partition is on /dev/hda5)
/dev/hda5 /mnt/winshare vfat defaults 0 0


I prefer an entry in /etc/fstab as it saves me typing mount and umount commands everytime.

Hope that helps

if the win partitons is NTFS you cannot write to it. Actually, you could if really wanted to but you don't want to: you will lose data if you do. If you want a partiton where both linux and win can read and write, create a partion in fat32/vfat.

How does one go about changing the permissions on the ntfs drive so that someone other than root can view the drive?

I try chmod as root and get a permission denied error.

you've got to do it in the /etc/fstab. Something like this
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c ntfs auto,iocharset=utf8,umask=0 0 0

the crucial option is the umask=0. Leave the rest as you have it now in your fstab. After the changes in fstab, unmount the ntfs partition and mount it again.

I am wanting to get access to my windows xp drive as well from Red Hat 9.0 on a different harddrive. But when i try to write to /etc/fstab or if i try to make directory winshare in /mnt I get the message "permission denied." Does anyone have any ideas how i can fix this?

thanks.

you have to be root to write to fstab or to /mnt

I have similar question. I changed fstab by adding the following:

/dev/hdb5 /mnt/vfat vfat auto,umask=0 0 0

I expected to be able to access hdb5 by
cd /mnt/vfat.

But after I reboot the system, I did

cd /mint/vfat
ls

I got nothing! Sure, there are something on this partition.

But if I issue
mount -t vfat /dev/hdb5 /mnt/vfat

everything is fine. What was wrong with my fstab change? Did I miss something else to auto mount?

Many thanks!

Ffang

The above works great, so I entered :-

/dev/hdi2 /mnt/win_d vfat noauto,user 0 0 into my /etc/fstab and reloaded my machine, and it doesn't auto mount....what am I doing wrong, if I type the message in again, I can access the files.

the option "noauto" says not to mount this filesystem automatically. If you want to have the filesystem mounted during boot, you should change the option to something similar to

/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat user 0 0

or to

/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat defaults 0 0

If I remeber the man pages correctly, this should enable the automatic mounting.

However, using this line, only root should be able to see any files. I use this line in /etc/fstab:

/dev/hda2 /C ntfs noauto,user,uid=500,gid=500 0 0

which lets all files in /C appear as though the belonged to user-id=500, group-id=500 (which happens to be myself). BTW, my line from /etc/fstab does not mount /C automatically.

HTH