Is there no way of mounting a NTFS partition? If it isn´t is there a way to change that to FAT32 without ruining the data.

THX

It depends on whether your kernel was compiled to support ntfs filesystems.

The filesystems your Linux installation knows about are listed in /proc/filesystems. If ntfs is listed there, you can mount it. If it is not listed, you will need to recompile your kernel to be able to mount it.

There is no simple way to change to FAT32 without corrupting your data.

Thanks for the answer I'm new to the linux game and appreciate any help I can get.

Unfortunately it's not there. So recompiling it is now where do I find the answer on how
to do something like that?

Greetings!


Well I have two pieces of advice which are rather controversial, so use at your own risk.

You don't have to recompile your entire kernel to add ntfs support (which is read only, btw). Change directory to /usr/src/linux/ - provided you have your kernel sources there - and do a 'make menuconfig' or whatever configuration utility you prefer. Add ntfs support as a module, exit and save the configuration and do a 'make modules' and after that do 'make modules_install'. Now you have to issue 'depmod -a' and you can load the module and mount ntfs volumes from now on. However I do not know if it is recommented to add modules like this without recompiling the kernel. I just know it worked for me once.

And yes, there is a way to convert an ntfs partition to fat32. Partition Magic is capable of this. However I have seen quite a few posts of ppl who do not seem to trust those programs. Some even seem to have had data loss with them... so use at your own risk.


Bye!