How to access second Hard Drive
 

I've just installed SUSE 10 and using Gnome but I can't figure out how to access my Windows Drive. My hardware detection lists it as hdd and on boot up it gives me the option to boot to that drive (it's the second drive installed and Linux is installed on the first drive). I would like to make a short cut to my desktop and be able to store data on it.

Assuming that you have 2000/XP installed then you won't be able to have write access to the drive only read.

Linux does not natively support writing to NTFS drives, there is captive-ntfs (uses windows system files to access the partition) but i would not recommend it for a newbie.

All you can do is mount it read only with (as root):

mount -t ntfs /dev/hdd /mnt/windows

or by adding an entry into your fstab file (which Suse should have done for you)

The second drive is formatted FAT32 with the fdisk command from a windows/ME start-up disk. It does not have the full operating system on it. I used this drive just for storage just incase the primary drive ever failed. I have an Omega ZIP Drive and Suse put the Icon on the deskop and I can access it and read and write files to it but not to the second Hard Drive.

The setup that I recommend is a separate FAT32 partition for data. This is easily accessbile (read and write) from both Linux and Windows.

Ideally, the data partition would be a separate physical drive.---eg you could have windows and Linux OSes and apps on one drive, and data on the second

I finally figured it out. If I click on My Computer Icon on the Desktop then filesystem i found the folder labeled Windows and I can now access all the files I've saved from the old windows OS. I've been in this folder several times (filesystem) but I was opening the dev folder trying to open the hdd Icon and didn't even see the folder titled Windows. Well I thought that thats all I had to do. After I found the Windows file it would let me access the drive but I couldn't save anything to it or move it to my desktop. I had to log in as root and chang the permissions for the folder and now I have full control of the drive.