Hi,
There is a bit of a story behind this so please bear with me.
I had Windows 98 in a partition as FAT32, then a spare partition again FAT32 and then a Third partition with Mandrake 8.2 on (when i sat third partition I mean all the partitions that mandrake uses).
I then decided to install Windows XP, so in it went in the first partition instead of windows 98, and of course (me not thinking) its NTFS.
When I came to boot back into mandrake it lets me get in and works fine but it says it failed to mount drives, and i cant acces my win_c partition (NTFS). Now I guess this is because of the NTFS, although NTFS support is enabled (read only) in my kernel.

It doesn't really bother me that I cant access it I just want the error to go away errors annoy me. So i would either like read access or just not to mount that drive at all - either way so the error goes away.

So I guess its just a case of a configuration somewhere that needs to be changed (well thats what I hope). So if anyone has any ideas then yor advice would be more than welcome.

Thank you for your time and even more thanks if you can help.
s0

Nice story! Very informative, so basically it sounds like you simply need to edit your /etc/fstab file. You can either look for the lines containing the old fat32 drive (vfat) and change the vfat to ntfs OR remove it completely. BE VERY CAREFUL when tampering with that file, you can dork your system too easily and need to "Rescue" it if you type something wrong, or remove the wrong thing.

So, first thing is back it up:
cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.old

THEN either post it here and let someone show you what to change, or attempt it yourself, and if something gets dorked post back asking how to fix your system

Cool

Hi,
Thanks for the reply, this is my /etc/fstab file:
/dev/hda6 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda8 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/mnt/cdrom /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdb,fs=iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-15 0 0
/mnt/cdrom2 /mnt/cdrom2 supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-15 0 0
/mnt/floppy /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=vfat,--,iocharset=iso8859-15,umask=0,sync,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat iocharset=iso8859-15,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat iocharset=iso8859-15,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0
/mnt/zip /mnt/zip supermount dev=/dev/sda4,fs=vfat,--,iocharset=iso8859-15,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda7 swap swap defaults 0 0

..so i guess the line where it says "...win_c vfat..." becomes "...win_c ntfs.." if that doesn't work can i just remove the line and it wont try to mount the drive.

I also noticed a file called "filesystems" which had in it:
ext2
nodev proc
nodev devpts
iso9660
reiserfs
vfat
...does ntfs need to be added to this as well.


Once again thanks for the help
s0

Maybe not, I believe you should have it 'modulized' already, and just needs to be loaded. So for now let's just change these 2 lines:
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat iocharset=iso8859-15,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat iocharset=iso8859-15,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0

To
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c ntfs umask=222,users,auto 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d ntfs umask=222,users,auto 0 0

And then remount with:
mount -a -o remount

This *should* either return an error that the filesystem is not supported, at which time you might try:
modprobe ntfs
Then run the mount command again. If no errors, you should be good to go.

Cool

Thats fantastic its worked a treat. Thankyou very much MasterC!
All i've gotta do is now decide whether to make the ntfs partition visible or whether just not to mount it. I've heard that even reading from an ntfs partition is quite dodgy and can mess things up quite easily. I do have the fat32 paritition (which is win_d so i didn't change that line ;-) so if i did want to transfer summit I could go into winxp copy to the fat32 and then go to mandrake and copy from the fat32 keeping everything safe.

Anyone have any ideas or advice?

Once again Thanks!!!
s0

It may have been dodgy in the beginning, I don't know. But I haven't heard any horror stories of people getting their data jacked from simply READING the NTFS drives. However if you are really concerned, then that extra little bit of caution is probably a good idea.

Cool

Since we're on the topic of critical files.

Is there any rescue disk we can use if we mess up linux big time ?

I'm using Redhat 7.3. So how do I go abt 'rescuing' ?

if you were to do it by installing Windows xp 1st then mandrake 8.2, will the bootloader recognize the NTFS partition?

if you were to do it by installing Windows xp 1st then mandrake 8.2, will the bootloader recognize the NTFS partition?

netkepala: You can probably just plugin your install disc and at the opening prompt type:
rescue

This is on most of the newer distros, and I doubt 7.3 would have left that out.

Flotilla: Yes, usually. Mandrake seems to do a decent job at recognizing and creating entries for existing partitions, even of the NTFS persuasion. And your question:
Yes, but it will probably call it NT. No worries, you can change it later. It will still boot your XP just the same.

Cool