write permisson windows files
 

I have win XP and mandrake 10, happened that win xp didn't work properly so I changed the boot ini in order to boot in safemode. The result is windows doesn't boot any more. I can boot linux but I am not able to change the boot.ini as is read only file. can I:
1. change permission to boot.ini file?
2. enable NTFS Write Support?
3. I downloaded xpquick to boot from floppy but I cannot format the floppy disk from XP, is there any method to format the floppy in mandrake with the windows files?
any other suggestion hints appreciated!

Tom

try installing the ntfs3g driver which allows to have write access on the windows partition.

in order to change the boot order i always used tools provided by linux. i would try to do it over linux after you fix your boot.ini

hope this helps..

1. 2. - use ntfs-3g driver
3. mkfs.msdos

NTFS write support is possible, but it requires fuse+ntfs-3g. It should be available in your repositories, if it isn't already installed. A search of this site or google should give you what you need to know to set it up.

Also, FAT and NTFS file systems don't handle *nix permissions natively. They have to be simulated at mount time with the "umask" mount option. The umask number is the inverse of the permissions you want, with "umask=002" giving you file permissions of 775, for example.

Finally, when editing Windows text files, be aware that the systems use different line-ending formats and possibly different character sets. Make sure you have your text editor set to straight iso-8859-1 and the dos/windows end-of-line setting for safest results.

wonderful! +1

compiler missing
 

I downloaded fuse+ntfs-3g, but when I type ./configure I got the message no acceptable C cmpiler found in path, any hints?

either the compiler which is necessary to compile the driver is not installed on your box or you are not running the command as root and the non-root user can't reach the compiler.

i am not familiar with mandrake distro but you must be able install the rpm packages without compiling them. just try install(as root) the rpm(like) packages for your distro.

after the installation i had to make a restart. It is not really usual for linux, anyway after the restart i was able to mount the partition using the command

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/win

before restart it didn't recognize the file system ntfs-3g.

hope this helps..