Will Linux see my old Winblows data drives?
 

Hey everyone! I'm in the process of moving over to Linux as my primary OS. Got a real quick question though: On my old Windows XP system, I had a couple of extra hard drives installed that I used to keep data, no OS files or anything. I think they're NTFS formatted. If I slave them to my new Linux drive, will I be able to see the data? I'm using Mandriva 2006 w/ KDE 3.5.3.

TIA

Don't know what you mean by "slave them to my Linux drive". Some distros will see NTFS--others you may have to compile it in to the kernel.
Assuming that NTFS support is in place, you will mount the drives to your file system. To make the mount permanent, you put an entry in /etc/fstab

For details:
man mount
man fstab

In my new Ubuntu 6.06 it automatically mounts ALL drives and puts icons on the desktop.

PS:

The better long-term solution for shared data is to put it on FAT32 partitions. This is easily read and written by both OSes.

Thanks for the reply. I just want to make sure I can get to the data, I have another drive I can put in the machine and format FAT32 and put the data on it if need be, just wasn't sure about NTFS. Main reason I ask, is my old WinXP drive won't boot anymore so I was curious whether or not I would have to reformat it with Windows just to get that data off the other drive...

The simple answer is yes, Linux can see and read Windows drives formatted with Windows file systems such as NTFS and FAT 32. The ability to do so "out of the box" varies between distributions. For example, my SUSE 10.0 box is triple boot with Linspire 5.0 and Windows XP Professional. SUSE can see and read all of the drives and partitions without my having to do or set up anything special.