Sorry, I'm a newb, and I'm trying to acess media files from my NTFS Partition on my HDA. (well, I think its HDA) Does primary/master and ide 1 or 2 matter? Please help.

Indeed it does. The breakdown is
Primary Master hda
Primary Slave hdb
Secondary Master hdc
Secondary Slave hdd

And if you get into SATA then it's sda/b/c/d

To mount it, you need to make sure the device:
fdisk -l

That's an L but lowercase.

Then you can see what devices exist. If hda1 exists, then:
mkdir /mnt/ntfs
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfs
should suffice. If not:
mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfs
might.

Short of that, the Live Version may not have the NTFS support built in, nor as module. You could compile the module, but that is far beyond a 'newbie' task, at least at this point.

Good Luck!

Cool

It isn't showing me any devices at all.....
It just went down a line to the next input

If I try to go on, it just says "only root can do that"

Ubuntu uses sudo for root commands, so:

sudo fdisk -l

AND

sudo mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

Cool

Ok, now I know what to do (kinda.) Would you mind sharing what those commands actually do, cause thats the only way I'll remember if I need to do it again. Why mount then mount again (mnt)??

Also, the hard drive has partitions, does that matter? When I type in:
sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfs
it says wrong fs type, bad file block, etc.

It may very well be some other filesystem, or the files you need reside on another partition. You can try the different ones, or the fdisk command may give you a hint by the last column shown. It identifies the type of partition it is, HPFS/NTFS or WIN32, or something like that.

The commands are doing the following:

fdisk -l
Is simply listing (-l) what devices there are that fdisk recognizes, it makes no changes to any drives. Nice for seeing what your OS sees.

mount is mounting the device (/dev/hda1) to a certain point, called a mount point. This can be any directory on your filesystem. There is a lot more to this, but this is really the basic idea. The mount point we made with:
mkdir /mnt/ntfs
But we could have make any directory anywhere. mkdir is the command to make a directory. Should the directory be a deep directory, like /mnt/ntfs/and/more/stuff We would have to create each directory seperately, or the mkdir command can be added a -p:
mkdir -p /mnt/ntfs/and/more/stuff
Will create all the directories necessary leading up to 'stuff'. And then we can mount /dev/hda1 at that point:
mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/ntfs/and/more/stuff

Hopefully my examples help explain my words

Cool

Ok, I started playing with it a bit, and got a friend that kindof knows linux to chat with, and this is where I got.

major minor #blocks name

3 0 156290904 hda
3 1 8217243 hda1
240 0 2096192 cloop0
254 0 1048576 dm-0
254 1 2096192 dm-1
254 2 8217243 dm-2


ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1/dm-2 /mnt/ntfs (there is a space there)
mount: special device /dev/hda1/dm-2 does not exist
(a path prefix is not a directory)

I don't know why this is working. I understand what everyting means, but I don't really understand what the error is telling me. (by that I meant that I know what I am typing and why, thanks to your explanation.)
Thanks a bunch for explaining and helping me.

The error is telling you, at least this time, that /dev/hda1/dm-2 is not real. You may have /dev/dm-2 however, I don't recognize that device.

Post the output of
sudo fdisk -l

So we can see what that shows you've got.

The above post shows the devices, but I don't know what command you executed to get it, so be sure when you post, include as much identification of what's going on as possible.



Cool

Ok, I'm at work now, so I can't check for a couple of hours. I'll edit this post to add the approptiate information. The command I used to get this was "cat ????" I can't remember what it was after cat. The fdisk -l (as I recall) only showed back /hda. I could be wrong on that, but I couldn't get it to display the information of the hda. Perhaps I need to specify hda somehow with the fdisk command? fdisk -l /dev/hda maybe? Thanks

P.S. What does the /dev mean and or do? Is there somewhere (that you know of) that can answer my newb questions like a FAQ or something?

Just as an FYI to anyone reading this post: In Ubuntu on a liveCD you have to say "sudo" before EVERY command.

No. Just the fdisk -l command. That's it. And rather than telling people what you see, it helps others help you if you merely copy and paste the output of the command. For example, when I type it in, this is what I get As far as I can tell, /dev stands for device and it actually refers to a directory (/dev) that has all the devices in your computer and connected to your computer.

Every command that requires root privileges. More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RootSudo

I be not sure about past releases,

But in the latest release I did a
sudo passwd root

after that is done you have a root password and can
su
password:

This saves the typing of sudo each time because you
have root permissions.