changing ownership of a mounted drive
 

I have mounted my windows partition on win directory..it belongs to root and as a normal user i cannot read it. wenn i try to change the ownership of the directory, i am getting an error message saying "filesystem could not be read". how can i deal with it?

I don't think permissions work the same in Linux and Windows... So, chowning files on an NTFS partition doesn't make sense.

Besides that, it looks like the partition is being mounted read-only.

so..how can i mount it being avaiable for a specified user?

Unmount the partition, and check the permissions on the mount-point dir... "ls -l /mnt/win". If it's not fully accessible to users, you can change the permission on it with chmod. When you mount it, it should then be readable by users.

As for writing, that's another story. Most distros come with the ability to read an NTFS partition; few come with the ability to write to one. You'd have to search Google, or hope somebody who's done it replies.

Try Slax if you want to write on NTFS partitions.

It is shipped with ntfs-3g, will mount every partition you have got, give you the root privilege and allow you to drag and drop files in the desktop exactly as though you are in a MS Windows.

Which distro are you using? I'm on Ubuntu, had similar problem, solved with ntfs-3g package.

If you do have Ubuntu, search for this package in Synaptic and install it, along with any suggested dependancies. You can then write to ntfs.

i am using opensuse 10.3
what is ntfs 3g ?
how can i install it?

It's just a package that allows you to write to ntfs-formatted drives. ntfs is a Windows filesystem, and by default, linux can only read it, not write to it. Installing the ntfs-3g package allows you to write as well as read.

I know nothing about OpenSUSE, so have a look here: http://en.opensuse.org/NTFS

try ...

mount -t ntfs -o uid=yourusername /dev/sda1 /mnt/win/

(or possibly uid=youruid ... don't have an nfs folder to mount right now to check it)

You don't need ntfs3g or any other read-write functionality if you're just trying to read from the partition. ntfs3g is a new-generation linux ntfs driver that has vastly improved support for writing, compared to previous ntfs linux support.

For reliable read/write support, you really need ntfs-3g. Look through the software manager under Yast, I'm sure you'll find it.

As for permissions, one of the earlier posters was right to point out that permissions under windows do not quite work the way they do under Linux. In order to make it work, you have to put these option in fstab:

defaults,uid=your_user_ID,gid=your_group_ID,umask=0022

So if your uid=1000 and your gid=1000, those are the values that need to be inserted.

I see that Ubuntu does it as simply as this: defaults,umask=007, gid=46 (gid here points to the plugdev group, which includes any users who have permissions to mount/umount disks). It may not be that simple on Suse (it may require some extra editing) so it is probably better to choose the first option.