I'm having troubles with my mepislinux server on my network, so I want to copy the Student folder to an external usb drive.

Before I try messing around with the machine's built in NI port, I wanted to at least copy the student folder to an external drive.
I plugged it in, it found it and popped the folder showing the contents of the usb drive on the screen.

I found the folder(s) in question on the computer
I right clicked on them, chose browse, browsed to the external drive.

However, this is where it stops working.
According the the progress window, there are a bunch of folders copied, although the progress still shows 0%

After a minute or so, an error message comes up.
<Could not make folder /media/sda1/Student>

Any suggestions for copying the folder? Ive been looking on other linux forums, but haven't found any thing specific yet.

Joe Fisher
Teacher, K-8
Marion, MT

Have you got a linux supported file system on the external drive? If it happens to be NTFS, then you will be able to read it, but not write to the drive, unless you install a driver for NTFS.

I think you hit the nail. It's NTFS I believe. Any idea as to what I can do make a Linux partition? I can't reformat the whole thing, there are files I need on it.
Joe

I'm going to clear off the external hard drive by moving all the files and folders to another windows computer.
I"m then going to format the external hard drive with Fat 32
I'll then get a new version of Mepis, install it and see what happens.

Joe

I'm surprised Mepis doesn't support NTFS writing by now - been a couple of years since I looked at it. But in general you should use the same filesystem type to ensure file attributes (like access rights) get copied correctly.

FAT is useless for this.
If the source is a Linux filesystem (ext2/3, reiser JFS, whatever), reformat the external as the same.

I have to read/write both Windows and Linux on the external drive. Therefore, FAT is is.
Joe

I have used a fat partition for sharing data for a long time. For the most part it works fine. Yes, from a linux perspective fat does not preserve file permissions. You have to look at what is most important, and if that is the sharing of the files, then fat is good for most purposes.

Linux support for NTFS for write comes with adding the ntfs-g3 driver. This would give you write support, however, it is still somewhat experimental. There are a lot of people using it now, and claim it works well. Just be for warned, if you decide to give it a go...