I have recently installed Mandrake 10.0. It successfully detects, installs, and mounts my LaCie external hard drive when I turn the drive on while booted in Linux. However, when I navigate to the hard drive, no files show up. My theory on why this happens is that I reformatted the LaCie drive to the NTFS file system before I started using it, and Mandrake's automatic configuration assumes it will be formatted to FAT32. I have too much data I would lose if I reformatted the LaCie back to FAT32, so I don't want to try to solve my problem by doing that. Can I simply open the /etc/fstab file as root and change the file system the LaCie is mounted to and get Linux to read the files on it? The type of file system for this device reads "ext2:vfat" even though my LInux partitions are formatted to ReiserFS. If a simple change in file type on the line in the fstab file describing the LaCie drive will allow me to read the files from it while I am running Linux, what should that part of the line be instead of "ext2:vfat"?

Hello and welcome to LQ !

Before changing your /etc/fstab, you can try mounting your external drive manually,

mount -t ntfs <external drive> <mount point>

and see if you can get your files.

and if you can, backup your data or have your external drive in 'read only / write lock' mode before experimenting. You never know what could happen