well this Linux queasy-newbie needs to mount an external hard drive with NTFS (on redHat 9.0). I found the ntfsmount software and installed it, but for this to work I need fuse.

I've grabbed fuse from the homepage as a tar ball and untraed it. ran .configure/make/make install and everything appeared to work correctly without errors. however when I modprobe fuse I get the error "Module fuse not found" and lsmode doesn’t list fuse.

From research online I know that there should be a /lib/modules/user/kernel/fs/fuse/fuse.so file. I have a /lib/modules/2.6.18-92.e15/kernel/fs and a /lib/modules/2.6.9-78.EL/kernel/fs/ntfs directory, but neither contain the fuse directory mentioned. I don't know anything about the directory structure so I don't know if the lack of a /lib/modules/user directory is a problem or not (I would assume not?)

I've also tried getting the fuse rpm and the fuse-ntfs rpm with identical results, ie they install perfectly but I still can't see fuse as a module. Any suggestions on how to get fuse or to mount this stupid external hard drive without it would be appreciated (hopefully with minimal rpm downloads, I don't have direct internet access and burning a cd for every rpm I need gets annoying )

Thanks in advance.

RH9 hit EOL(end of life) in 2003. There has been not updates to it since that time. Rh9 had a 2.4 based kernel and the vast majority of stuff out there assumes a 2.6 based kernel.

After RH9 RedHat switch to RHEL(Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and is currently on RHEL5.4. Unfortunately RHEL is a pay to play distro, fortunately Centos is RHEL with the logos remove. Centos is free to download/update. Centos 5.3 is current(5.4 should be out in about a month) and will have support until 2012(?). NTFS support and many other common applications are available in the common repos.

Thank you for the response. I had known redhat 9 was old but hadn’t realized how out of date it is.

Still I'm stuck with the problem that I have redhat and must mount a NTFS file system. My development must be done on the redhat machine so upgrading to a newer distro like Centos isn't really an option. Surely there is a way to mount NTFS even on an older kernel?

There very well may be a way to do it. But, since virtually no one has run it since 2003-2004, you are probably going to have a very tough time finding someone who remembers what the tricks were to get it done.

It is very possible that the current version of Centos will run on your hardware. Minimum requirements are only a Pentium with 256MB of ram (with gui/ 128MB without).

Just so we are clear on the commands.


tar zxvf fuse-2.7.0.tar.gz
cd fuse-2.7.0
./configure && make && sudo make install


http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsmount

iirc (& that's big IF), basic ntfs read wasn't even avail till 2.6 kernel, in which case you are SOL.
If you could put that disc in another system, you could try nfs or samba.
Depends what you need to do with the disc. Possibly you could upload the contents to another (modern) Linux system?

I was kind of afraid I would find out it was impossible. I'm stuck with redhat because I want to develop my code on the same OS it will run on. There are less convinent ways I can do what I need to I suppose, Thank you everyone for your input.

Why not upgrade the OS the code is going to run on? On setups like you are talking about we usually set up a temporary machine right next to it, get all the services (that are running on old OS) running on the new OS, and switch over to the temporary machine (once it is ready). We then let it run for a few weeks to make sure we did not miss anything(if fails we can swap the old machine back in within a couple of minutes). Once we know everything is happy, we update the old machine, and swap it back in.