[Sussex] Newb Question - Reading NTFS filesystem

[John D.]

Ronan Chilvers wrote:

>Hi Neil
>
>On Thu, 24 Nov 2005 11:05:24 +0000
>Neil Simmons <nasimmons at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Google tells me that Linux can read NTFS. I'd like to be able to
>>access it from Linux, so that I can play my mp3s in a decent OS, but
>>at present, the filesystem doesn't see the drive at all.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Officially NTFS is read-only for penguins.  Write support is available
>but is not stable or safe at all.  Ubuntu for example sets up NTFS
>partitions as read only on install.
>
>  
>
>>Please could someone offer some advice as to how I:
>>
>> - mount that hdd so that I can actually see it, and
>>    
>>
>
>Suprised your Ubuntu install didn't do this, but on my Hoary
>workstation I have the following in /etc/fstab
>
>/dev/hda1       /media/windows  auto    ro,users,noauto  0       0
>
>That is, /dev/hda1 is my windows 2000 partition and the filesystem type
>is automagically worked out by the kernel on mount.
>
>  
>
>> - read (do I need to execute too?) the files in NTFS?
>>    
>>
>
>Once mounted, you can just open the filesystem directly in nautilus.
>One strangeness is that I need to be root to read the filesystem which
>is annoying, despite the 'users' parameter in the fstab line.  You
>could replace the 'noauto' with 'auto' to get it mounted on boot.
>
>  
>
>>Or should I just shift the data, reformat in FAT and start again?
>>    
>>
>
>FAT32 is well supported - I'd go for that.
>
Which is what I did - and discovered some of the limitations of 
Partition Magic 8.

So if you follow the route of making the NTFS partition a FAT32 
partition, make sure it's down as a Windows FAT32 partition not a Linux 
FAT32 partition otherwise eckspee won't see it - in my case, it was all 
on a single hdd and the bit that I was converting, was from my /home, 
which is why, I suspect, that I got it wrong. My attempts at correcting 
this, meant that I screwed the partition table and ended up having to 
re-install stuff - which somewhat conveniently co-incided with my 
dumping of windows completely.

I would think that you shouldn't be affected in the same way as you have 
different hdd's, but I figured that it might be worthy of mention.

regards

John D.