soundcards on laptops and reading ntfs
 

evenin'

not really a newbie to linux but i am to mucking about with the innards (that why you have a tech department surely?) so two, hopefully little, problems that i'm sure will not overtax your collective techie brilliance.

running Scientific Linux SL with KDE on a Dell Inspiron 6000.

firstly how do i read my windows partitions. 'yum search ntfs' comes back with no matches and the only instructions i could found was the rather cryptic 'you may need to add another repository' yeah... cheers. where! how! i can't play my tunes if i can't read from windows and i can't code in silence! it's not right!

secondly (but relatedly) searching for the soundcard on my laptop with the tool in kde yields 'no soundcard found'. is there a driver for this laptop? also kmix opens up with a small and completely empty window. surely this is not good.

any help gratefully received. especially if i understand them.

cheers.

Hey,

If you wanna access your windows ntfs partition theres a couple of things you need to do. First off you need to make sure the ntfs file system support is compilied into the kernel. After that you need to make a directory to mount the filesystem too, so for arguments sake lets do it in the default location of /mnt. Login as a root since root is the only one who can create a directory to /mnt. then execute this command from the console :

mkdir windows

After that you should have a windows directory in /mnt. Now we need to mount the windows partition and link it to the directory. To do that execute :

mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows (substitute hda1 to your partition location(hda2, hdb3, etc.))
note : You must do this as root in the mnt directory and you will have to do this every time you reboot the computer.

now you should be able to navigate through your windows partition and find your music.

If you want linux to mount this for you just add the information to your /etc/fstab accordingly.


As for your soundcard, make sure you have the right driver compiled in the kernel for the sound card to be supported.

yup, understood this bit. cheers muchly.

problem is i don't think i have ntfs support in the kernal. 'yum search ntfs' shows no matches so how do i put this support in?

the very phrase 'compile the kernal' strikes fear into my non-techie heart.

i'm a true newbie and i have pretty much the same problem, i want to see my windows partitions from inux; i've read what u posted but : "mount: unknown filesystem type 'ntfs'"

what do i need to do??????