I am using slack 10 and am trying to import my music from my ntfs windows partition. I tried changing permissions in root but it will give me a random windows file saying I dont have sufficient permission to change the settings of the file even though im logged in as root.

ntfs is read only unless you mount it rw (which is a bad idea). Just copy off the files to your linux filesystem and format the disk.

permissions for win-partitions are set in the "/etc/fstab " file.
i've got this for ntfs :

dev/hda3 /win-e ntfs ro,user,umask=222 1 0

it's mounted readonly and users can play music form it.

egag

The critical point is the umask option in /etc/fstab.

Since ntfs uses another system to set file permissions, it is not compatible with the unix style permissions. Additionally you cannot write on ntfs in a safe way. The umask parameter 'translates' the ntfs permissions into the unix system. This is rather unflexible, since the parameter that is set in fstab is valid for the whole partition, but it works. The umask parameter is substracted from full unix permissions. Setting umask=2 gives unix permission 5, which means read and exec rights. Changing single file/folder permissions doesn't make sense due to the above mentioned restrictions.

To make the long story short: add umask=000 to the options in /etc/fstab (see egag's post) and you have full permission for everyone (even write permissions, although that doesn't make much sense).

thank you very much for the replies ill get back to you to see if it works!