how do i access my second harddrive

heeh well lets just say your going to have to give more of an explanation/question as to what your referring too....is it another harddrive with a linux partition.? is it a FAT drive? is it an NTFS drive? is it a drive other than what i specified?

its a ntfs drive

Be VERY VERY careful. You can read NTFS but do NOT write to it unless you know for sure it is safe with your distro. You can really hose your NTFS if it is not supported.

My two cents worth, create a fat32 partition and use that to transfer files. Both Linux and XP can read and write to fat32. That is safe.

Hope that helps.

yes thats good info but how do i go about seeing it

I t would be nice if you'd tell us what Linux distribution you are using. Not all kernels supports NTFS. The stock kernels that come with RedHat 9, for example, do not support NTFS. You have to build a custom kernel. I can't speak for others, as I'm not familiar with them. Per dalek's post, using fat32 is a better (and safer) way to go as both OSes can read AND write to it safely.

You don't give any details, so for the sake of example, I will assume you have a single partition (making it partition 1) on your second harddrive, which is configured as a slave drive on your first ide channel (making it hdb). So, you are trying to mount /dev/hdb1. You need to create a mountpoint (by making a direcotry) to mount the disk on to. Traditionally, mountpoints for foreign filesystems are put under /mnt. So here is what you need to do as root:

mkdir /mnt/ntfs
mount -t ntfs /dev/hdb1 /mnt/ntfs -o ro

This will mount the NTFS partition read-only. You should see the contents of the drive by doing "ls /mnt/ntfs". If this works and you are happy with it, you can add an entry into /etc/fstab so the partition is mounted at boot time:

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/ntfs ntfs ro,auto 0 0

If you go the fat32 route, use "vfat" instead of "ntfs" for the filesystem type. You can call the mountpoint anything you want (like "/mnt/windows" or "/mnt/fat" or "/mnt/bill-blows" or whatever). You can also omit the "ro" option, as you can mount vfat/fat32 partitions read-write.

Good Luck!

Greg

Sorry, I just noticed your profile indicates you are using RH 9, I wasn't paying attention. But, per my previous posrt, you can't mount an NTFS partition with RH 9 unless you build a custom kernel. And I get the imrpession you're not ready to give that a try.

Greg

ok thanks thats very helpful but unfortunatley you are right the kernel version i am running does not support ntfs. i believe i am running the latest kernel release?

This is what you need:
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.html#down