i have two hard drives in my computer. one is sata hard drive and another one is IDE. i have installed the windows XP in the sata hard drive and the redhat linux enterprise 5 in the IDE hard drive. my SATA hard drive is in NTFS format. now i want to mount my windows hard drive in linux. how can i do it?

Serve it as Samba and mount it from server to a directory.

Did you try?
You could add something similiar in your fstab so it can be mounted automatically since boot time,etc. Also, you might try checking the manuals of mount.

Samba? Why do you need samba server when machine is in dual boot?
This has been explained before on how to mount ntfs windows partitions in linux.
If you are not using a newest version of kernel then you might want to install ntfs-3g from www.ntfs-3g.org.
If your package manager allows to install it, then you might want to use it rather than compiling from source.

For adding to /etc/fstab (assuming your ntfs drive is sda1)
1. Create a directory to use as mount point eg. /media/win_drive
2. Append the following at end of file --

/dev/sda1 /media/win_drive ntfs-3g user 0 0

Explanation --
/dev/sda1 - your partition. you can use "sudo fdisk -l" to check yourpartitions
/media/win_drive - directory used to mount the partition
ntfs-3g type of filesystem
user - one of the many options used to mount. This one means anyone can mount it.
0 - is used by dump (a backup utility) to decide if a filesystem should be backed up. If zero then dump will ignore that filesystem.
0 - is used by fsck (the filesystem check utility) to determine the order in which filesystems should be checked.
If zero then fsck won't check the filesystem.

Use nano or vim to edit /etc/fstab

Sorry, I missunderstood. I thought screwdriver wanted to access it via network from another machine on XP.

To mount the device:
To UNmount the device:
I suppose I would check out that ntfs-3g driver, too...

ntfs-3g is must for NTFS. ntfs is simply obsolete and dangerous. You'll be able only to read carefully, and not always. Just install ntfs-3g and confirm that

student04,

i tried your solution.but it said "unknown file system type ntfs". don't know what to do ...waiting for your reply

it should be
where your_partition_name should be something as sda1 and /path/to/free/dir /media/windows. But you need to install ntfs-3g. To do so... ¿which distro are you using (debian,redhat,suse,etc.)?

well i am using the red hat Linux enterprise 5. will u also give me the solution to mount the drive if the drive is in fat32 format?

fat32 is much easier:
where your_partition_name should be something as sda1 and /path/to/free/dir is an existing directory, such as /media/windows .

I don't use Redhat, so I don't know at all how is named the package manager (yum?). But if you know it, you'll probably fast find out ntfs-3g and easily install it.

emi

I've always only had the desire to read from my NTFS partitions (too nervous to write to them). You're saying this is safer for reading, too?

Try my above but substitute "ntfs" with "ntfs-3g". If that does not work you must install it with the package manager included with RedHat (as everyone is hinting towards).

Assuming you already made the directory /mnt/windows:
Check out the bottom part of NTFS-3G's homepage at http://www.ntfs-3g.org/, section "Usage".

I don't remember the syntax for installing package with the command line, but try:
Otherwise look through your menus to find the package manager, and search for this. Then try the mounting command again.

-AM

emi,
now it says mount point media/windows does not exists.

So create it. The mount point is a directory on your system somewhere. 'mount' cannot mount to a non-existent directory.