hi can you help me just installed suse9.1 after i did an clean xp reinstall and
i have everything working it seems in both systems. I knew that i would need a partition to swap files between the two systems so i have set out the following partitons:
main portion of hd is ntfs 99gb~
- extended 16gb~
10gb~ reiser suse
1gb~swap
5gb fat 32 (the partiton that needs to be writeable by both systems)

the problem is that i can't find the ntfs partion and view it's files and i have set up the mount point of the fat32 as /mnt/hda5 but this is read only. so if you could help me i would be grateful.

windows xp /Suse 9.1
gurb boot manager
2500+ amd athalon
512mbram
114 samsung hd (120 unformated)
need any more info i will be happy to supply it.

You could help us by posting your /etc/fstab (contains information on how to mount drives) and the output of 'fdisk -l', which shows all partitions that are being recognised. For the later command you need to be root.

In general: you may need to set the option umask=002 or umask=000 in /etc/fstab to get write access on fat32 partitions, since fat32 cannot deal with Linux/Unix permissions.

here we go contence of fstab
/dev/hda6 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hda7 swap swap pri=42 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620, gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
/dev/dvd /media/dvd subfs
fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid, nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 00
/dev/dvdrecorder /media/dvdrecorder subfs
fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid, nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 00
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid, sync 00
/dev/hda5 /mediahda5 vfat defaults 00

there sorry about the formatting hope this is of some help.

So there are no entries for your NTFS partitions. That's why we need the output of fdisk -l (small "L") to see how to create the correct entries.

Try to add umask=000 right after defaults in the last line:

sorry but how do you enter the command fdisk -i is it in windows, dos or linux ?
Thanks for that code for the fat 32 though works like a dream.

Linux and fdisk -l not -i (see above posts)! Be root!

ok here is all the data from that command thanks for the command to make the fat 32 drive writeable worked perfectly
Disk /dev/hda: 120.0 GB, 120060444672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14596 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 12407 99659196 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 12408 14596 17583142+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 12408 13060 5245191 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda6 13061 14432 11020558+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda7 14433 14595 1309266 82 Linux swap

Try this:

create the mountpoint (if not existent):

open console

add the following line to /etc/fstab:

On next reboot, the partition should be mouted automatically.