SuSe Can't See Contents of Windoze FAT32 Drive
 

I have a dual boot system and here is the layout/configuration of the hard drives.

C:\ Windoze XP (NTFS)
D:\ SuSe Linux 9.2 Professional
E:\ (No O/S) Simply has backup data from Windoze

I have even mounted this drive at mount point E: as a FAT32 Windoze drive. Why cannot I access the simple files or any files located on this drive? It appears as E:\ in SuSe. When I click on it, however, I see nothing. Any suggestions?

Please post /etc/fstab. Maybe you need to change some options.

/dev/hda6 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hda1 /windows/C ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hda2 /windows/D vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /windows/E vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hda5 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/cdrecorder /media/cdrecorder subfs fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/dvdrecorder /media/dvdrecorder subfs fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0

I am not sure what the option 'nls' means. But I would suggest to change it from utf8 to iso8859-1 or to remove this entry. I think that Windows does not use UTF8 per default.

It could also be that the drive didn't get mounted automatically. Have a look in /etc/mtab (or mount -l) if the drive appears in that list. If not, you may try to mount it manually (mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /windows/E) and see if it works this way. If you add the option 'auto' to the fstab line, the drive should be mounted on boottime.

Okay, let me see if these will narrow down the problem. I can actually write to this drive in SuSe, however I cannot access any information that Windoze has written to it. At first this drive was an NTFS drive. Since I have a dual boot, I went in to Windoze XP and used Norton Ghost to format and convert the drive into a FAT32. Then, while in Windoze, I placed some files onto this drive (mp3, doc, xls, jpg, gif, avi, wmv, mpg, . . . etc.) Anyhow those are the files that I cannot access. If I click on my Devices side bar tab, the drive comes up in SuSe and I can successfully create a folder on this drive. But all of the other files are not coming up from Windoze. I hope this narrows the scope of the problem.

Thanx, chaning fron UTF to ISO did the trick. Much appreciated!