Red Hat 8.0 and NTFS and Kernel
 

Can anyone give my any advice concerning kernel recompilation? I'm using Red Hat 8.0 and the kernel doesn't support NTFS (yet). I'd like to be able to at least have read access to the Win 2000 disk in my machine.

I'm also having trouble with GRUB, it will not boot Win 2k, although Win 2k is on a separate disk.

Before switching to Red Hat 8.0 I was using SuSE 7.3, I was able to read the Win 2k disk and boot Windows using Lilo.

Thanks for any help.

Doesn't RH 8.0 use the 2.4.19 kernel? My Mandrake 9.0 uses 2.4.19 and I get read-only access on my XP Pro NTFS disk.

Red Hat Kernel
 

46and2,

The Red Hat 8.0 I have has the 2.4.18 Kernel. When I try to mount the disk using the Red Hat User Mount Tool the system displays an error box with the following text :

"mount: fs type ntfs not supported by kernel"

I've tried to recompile the kernel, but with no success.

ntfs isn't supported by default in Red Hat 8 as far as I know.

What has your problem been with recompiling the kernel? Did you use the one that comes with redhat 8?

One hack you could try (i'm not sure if it would work) would be to configure the kernel (using menuconfig or whatever) to use ntfs as a module. If make bzImage fails try running just 'make modules'.

Then do a 'find /usr/src/linux-VERSION -name ntfs.o' and copy the file it finds (if it finds one) to /lib/modules/VERSION/kernel/fs/ntfs/ntfs.o

You should then be able to do an 'insmod ntfs'

--
This is just something you can try, I don't know if it'll work or not.

As for the grub configuration, try something like this:

---
default 0
timeout 30
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=Your linux partition
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/hda3

title=Your 2k partition
root (hd0,4)
chainloader +1
---

If you've used lilo before then
hd0,0 is equivalent to hda1 and
hd0,4 is equivalent to hda5.

hdb1 would be hd1,0

Grub ANd Kernel
 

Thanks for the advice, I've tried a similar grub.conf file, but it didn't work. This is what I have now:

default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-14)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-14 ro root=LABEL=/
initrd /initrd-2.4.18-14.img

title Windows 2000
root (hd1,0)
chainloader+1

It's short and simple, but it still doesn't work.

As for the kernel, I read the article at this site:

http://www.getlinuxonline.com/omp/di.../ompntfs2.html

It almost worked, I made it all the way to the /sbin/depmod -a line, where I encountered an error. I didn't write it down, I'll work through the procedure again and post the error.

Kernel Recompiliation
 

As I mentioned above, I followed the article posted at this site:

http://www.getlinuxonline.com/omp/di.../ompntfs2.html

I successfully made it to the /sbin/depmod -a step then I received this error:

depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.18-14/kernel/fs/ntfs/ntfs.old

What does that mean? How do I rectify that situation?

Thanks for the help.

I wonder if you need to have a space between chainloader and +1?

For the ntfs support, I'm not sure why you have a file called ntfs.old in that directory. What does an
'ls /lib/modules/2.4.18-14/kernel/fs/ntfs/'
give you?

Kernel & Grub
 

The ls /lib/modules/2.4.18-14/kernel/fs/ntfs/' returns : ntfs.o ntfs.old.

I'm not sure where the ntfs.old came from. I could probably delete it.