hey guys,
Well today i'm a mandrake user...and a happy one too. Having tried in the past without luck (seeing modem) today i've managed to crack the linux gold pot. I've installed mandrake 9.0 (upgrading to 9.1 soon) onto a 20gig hdd without any problems at all. Now i'm wondering if i use my old 40gig ntfs drive as a slave and read/use the contents from it?? I have plugged it in and mandrake has detected it without problems but now i'm not sure how to read it's contents. From memory linux wont read contents of fat32 or ntfs disks....but that was ages ago so i'm hoping things may have changed. Alternatelly are there any programs that can convert a drive from ntfs to the linux happy type of file system while keeping the contents of the drive intact??

as you can tell im a noob with linux so any help is much apreciated.

Welcome to LQ

Currently linux can read and write to Fat32, and can read from NTFS.

If Mandrake already set it all up for you, you just have to go to the relative directory it's mounted at. Usually in /mnt

If you post up:
/etc/fstab
We might be able to guide you to the exact location a bit better

Cool

Damn that was quick

ok when i go /mnt i find that konqueror freezes.

heres /etc/fstab...

/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdd,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

guessing that there's still another step i need to make here.

thanks for your help MasterC. Have to go to work now but will check back with the board in the morning.

widowmaker

Yeah, it doesn't look like it has set it up quite yet. Can you tell us where the drive is? What I mean is:
Primary Master
Primary Slave
Secondary Master
Secondary Slave
Or is it on a controller card?

Post up what you get from typing:
fdisk -l

Cool

Yeah sorry, the drive i'm attempting to see is a primary slave drive.

i don't seem to be getting anything happeing when i type fdisk -|

:/ gotto run now but will have a looksi when i'm home

Open a Konsole

su
Then type your root paswword

mkdir /mnt/windows

(now you've got a mount point) - next

kedit /etc/fstab

(your fstab file will open)

Put an entry at the bottom of your /etc/fstab file on a new line.

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/windows ntfs auto,ro,umask=0222 0 0

Ive put in /dev/hdb1 - just put in the relevant partition number

( btw - Your primary slave is described sd /dev/hdb )

submit button jammed under high load - pressed 3 times

submit button jammed

submit button jammed

Whoa! Ultra jammage eh?

Cool

Submit button spammed.... submit button spammed.... submit button spammed....

Hehehe guys ........... The thing got cloged up when I tried to submit - I then pressed it three other times - eventually it came through but with 3 other entries.

Yeah...... I know the feeling.

I haven't had any problems with these forums, but only others.

Okay back to the topic. Were previous versions of Linux [distros] unable to read NTFS? Since when?

Oh yeah, definitely. Not too long ago, in a place not far from here there lived a distro or 50 that couldn't because there was no NTFS module. If I had to guess a year, I'd say mid 2000ish? Just a number really, check out the Linux NTFS project page for a real number (I'd guess).



Cool

thanks all very much guys, it's all working nicelly for me now. I removed the slave drive and put it in another machine to convert it to fat32 using partition magic (under windows) and now have write access to this drive with all my files intact.

It feels great to finally get somewhere with linux and can already see myself being converted