mounting windows partition
 

:scratch: i am having problems mounting my windows partition in redhat linux 8.0 i am using this command:

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows -t ntfs

and when ever i go to /mnt/windows i dont get my windows partition but this stuff:

boot.ini NTDETECT.COM ntldr RECYCLER System Volume Information

can somebody please tell me what this is and please help me mount my windows partition. :scratch:

That is your windows partition. Those are hidden files on C:\. But the -t ntfs is probably being ignored if it doesn't generate an error. It's supposed to be between 'mount' and '/dev/...' Is that *all* you get? I have no idea where the rest of your C: drive/disk partition is.

you may try without ' -t ' option.......

What version of windows are you using? And are you sure it's an NTFS partition? (Windows XP uses FAT32 in some cases...)

You have the order of your command wrong, it should go like this:

mount -t (type) /dev/(device) /mnt/(localDir)

Try the auto filetype, that may work. Do this:
mount -t autofs /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows

What you are doing right now is telling the mount script that you only wish to mount certain files in the drive that contain the word 'ntfs'

i am using Microsoft Windows XP Professional edition and my partition is ntfs and none of this stuff worked

oh, well there is your problem. you cant mount ntfs file formats. sorry I didnt notice that before. I dont know why it isnt supported, or if it will ever be, all I know is that it isnt. If you still have some space left on your harddrive, I would reccomend making a 2-4 GB FAT32 partition that you can use to transfer files between the two OSs.

Yes you can. You just can't safely write to it.

If /etc/fstab has something like

/dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2 ntfs uid=1000,gid=100,ro 0 0

it's mounted automatically at boot and is accessible to me as normal user. (That's my offline box.)

You could try something like adding noauto to the options section (if you don't want it mounted all the time) and it should still mount with a simple 'mount /mnt/hda2'. Can't remember the details but I think

mount -t ntfs -o uid=1000,gid=100,ro /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2

issued as root at the command line should give you the partition as user. (Otherwise I guess you'd have to change the perms on the device file itself, first.)

Substitute the actual partitions, mountpoints, id's, and so on, where appropriate, of course.

Irrelevant explanatory digression: I have a symlink '~/c_my_documents' to '/mnt/hda2/blahblah/My Documents' because I have to mount the whole partition but don't want to have the whole drive in /home or to navigate through all the crap to get to my files. My NTFS drive on that box is a hell of a lot bigger than my reiser drive so I keep audiofiles and similar files that take up a lot of space and that I don't need to write to there to save space since I have one of those screwed up OEM XP's and, while I never use it, I don't feel like deleting it or reinstalling it in order to repartition. My boxes are a mess. And I'm sure this is not recommended procedure but it works and the box is invulnerable to remote exploits :D so I don't care if I'm tripping over some security issue. If anybody has better stuff, I'd love to hear it. And if this doesn't work for you, acidbreez, I have no idea what's wrong.

Make sure you have your ntfs kernel support. Either compiled in from the kernel source, or there are modules obtainable here: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net

none of this stuff still didnt work i keep getting the same thing thanks any way

If none of this works, then I'd say that something is really wrong... Are you sure there are files there actually? You seem them in windows then?

no i dont see those files in windows.

Ouch. Well, if Windows doesn't see 'em and Linux doesn't see 'em, they aren't there to be seen. But how do you even boot Windows? Or is that list you gave in your first post incomplete? What exactly is your disk/partition layout and what exactly do 'ls' and 'dir' output regarding the Windows partition(s) from each system?

But it sounds like the files you're looking for got deleted somehow.

i figured it out but thanx everyone for trying to help. (hda1 is the boot loader bios so i wanted hdb1 instead.)