Hi there, I've just installed Suse 9.0 (9.1 is on order). I'm dual booting at the moment between Suse and XP, everything has gone swimmingly apart from one issue. I can't seem to mount my other windows drives (one 80gig ide and the other is a 320gig scsi raid). When I look in the partitioning section in Yast, I can see the drives, but its telling me that the partitions are sfs and not ntfs(they were formatted in xp as ntfs), when I try to mount them (tried using mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /dir and mount -t sfs /dev/sda1) I keep getting bad superblock (ntfs) and file system not supported (sfs). Is there any way I can mount these drives without having to re-partition/format them and hence destroying all the data on them?
I'm a bit of a newbie to Linux, so my apologies if this question has been asked a thousand times over, I couldn't see anything like when I searched.

Cheers

ewan

To me, it looks like the problem is raid-related. I don´t know if it will support a ntfs raid. ntfs itself is already trouble enough.
Did you set suse to work with raid?

I read somewhere that Paragon has a product to let linux access ntfs fs with read-write features. Maybe it can help.

SuSE linux has quite a good NTFS support. But Microsoft changes NTFS versions all the time. It may be that your installation does not support the NTFS version your partitions are using.

You may also have errors in your partitioning. I have seen Windows installations where starting block, ending block and partition size do not sum up (i know its 'impossible'), but windows worked just fine (actually it didn't, but could cope with it).

You might try Partition Magic to convert partitions to FAT32.

Hi bruno, its not really raid per se , its an external medea video RT unit. Even if it was a raid thing, I still don't understand why it can't mount my other standard ide drive (also ntfs) or why Suse sees both drives' filesystems as being sfs and not ntfs. Thanks for the tip though - I'll have a look at Paragon and I'll also see if I can convert the drives to fat without losing any data, which may make it a bit easier for suse to see them.
cheers

sorry sonhi - didn't see your post - I think converting to FAT32 may well be the easiest option.

I'm guessing you're using 'Dynamic Disks'. When you use that, the partitions appear to be 'SFS'. You will need to get the support for this in Linux (I think it's called lvm or ldm).

thanks for all your help guys - I used Partition Manager to change the discs from dynamic to basic and they all mounted no problem. I'll need to get around to reformatting them as FAT32 for some proper read/write access.