I am new to Linux and have an external hard drive that I am using for music to DJ. Under windows, I have no problem adding songs to the drive; but, under Linux (openSuse10.2) it says I do not have permission to change. I tried changing the permissions, but it won't let me do that either. Can someone help?

Did you try changing permissions as root?

added:
Gah, it occurs to me that this may not mean anything to you. If not, then bring up a terminal. Type "su" and press enter. Enter the root password. Then, type "chmod 777 mountpoint". Replace "mountpoint" with the directory where the drive is mounted, such as "chmod 777 /mnt".

If you've already figured out "sudo", then, of course, it's better to use "sudo chmod 777 mountpoint".

Yes, I think so. I used the superuser mode of Konquerer

The hard drive is listed as New Volume, but when I type it in as /media/New Volume it says no directory.

Type in "sysinfo:/" in the konqueror address bar. If the drive is listed, right click and select "mount". SuSE uses hal and udev to create a device for it automatically. If it is working correctly, it should be mounted if you enter the drive.

You haven't indicated how the drive is formatted or what the device is. It is also possible to manually mount the drive. If it is a fat32 drive, then you can't use "chmod". Instead, you need to use a mount option to affect the ownership or permissions.

I typed in sysinfo, but it does not give me the option to "mount" the drive. It appears that the filesystem is NTFS, which I know might be a problem. If it is, how do I format the drive to one that would work with Linux and Windows while not losing my music?

"It appears that the filesystem is NTFS, which I know might be a problem. If it is, how do I format the drive to one that would work with Linux and Windows while not losing my music?"

Unfortunately, you don't. We only have a read-only NTFS filesystem at the moment. Billy-Boy does make it hard to convert to Linux, doesn't he?

Both Linux and Windows have full access to fat32 drives. You will need to back up your songs first, before reformatting.

Do I need to use Windows to reformat the hard drive to fat32 or can I still use Linux?

You can use either. If you use Windows XP, there may be a limit ( 32 or 64 GB I think ) to the size of the partition. You may need to read up on the different fat types of partitions and their capabilities. The mkfs.vfat program can be used to create a fat12, fat16 or fat32 filesystem.

Your Linux distro may also have a partitioner program that will do it as well.

Ok, so I installed the NTFS-3G Read/Write drivers. When I look at the drive permissions, it says that the owner (user) has permission to read/write to the drive, yet I still get "access denied" whenever I attempt to move my .mp3 files to it.

hey

can you give me the contents of /etc/fstab? I beleive you have kate in suse.

slybob

/etc/fstab does not give any information about the external hard drive, it only says...

/dev/hda7 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hda8 /home ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/hda1 /windows/C ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hda5 /windows/D ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,sync 0 0

usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0

hmmm this line is looking promising but it does not seem to have a mount point. Im afraid I scrapped suse quite early on for Ubuntu I know it does somthing funny with usb drives. I had hell getting it to r/w to a usb drive.(I was very noob then rather than just quite noob)

Its important you find out what the device is called. Usually its /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2. It could well be /proc/bus/usb.

you could try editing /etc/fstab (File System Table)

This would be for a Vfat partition on /dev/sda1, accessable by everyone, not automatically mounted at boot.

This would be for an automatically discovered partition on /dev/sda1, accessable by everyone, automatically mounted at boot.

If you format it from linux as Reiser or from windows as Vfat it should be readable by both systems. This might take a bit of trial and error to get it working but if your patient...:-)

try searching google for "usb fstab suse" see what comes up

hope this helps :-)

P.S. I think suse is quite advanced and perhaps not that friendly for your average noob, you might want to give ubuntu a try. get the live cd (put it in the cd drive and see if it works) from http://www.kubuntu.org/

slybob

As a longtime 3-operating systems user I'd like to second the "reformat the drive as FAT, splitting it into multiple partitions if necessary" suggestion. It makes life easy, and the FAT size limitation is just a minor pain.

In an ideal world we'd all be using ReiserFS or something like it, but in this all too real world FAT is the universally understood, if primitive, format. Most media files have a maximum size of 1Gb anyway precisely so that old file systems can cope with them.

Regards, twopennurth. So now I'm broke.