Mounting HD

[chunkmartinez]

How can i mount an NTFS HD using a live distro like dsl or maybe knoppix??

[jbennet]

beware viewing NTFS is ok but NEVER EVER EVER write to NTFS from linux it will break it

[John A]

Like proliant_fan described, NTFS partition mounting in Linux is read-only. To mount it:

First of all, open a terminal and gain root access. This is usually accomplished with su .

If you don't have an empty directory to mount the partition, you'll need to create one. Directories for mounting filesystems and other devices are usually created in /mnt. So for example, to create a new directory for the partition, you might want to enter the following command:

mkdir /mnt/ntfswin

Now that you've got an empty directory to mount the partition, it's time to mount it. You need to know the partition number of the partition, which is usually something along the lines of /dev/hdax, where x is the partition number. If you don't know, run sfdisk:

sfdisk -l

Now you can actually mount it:

mount -t ntfs /dev/hdax /mnt/ntfswin

Hope this helps

[jbennet]

read only is fine if, say you are recovering your files from a broken windows installation

But if you want to swap files between windows and linux you should really use something like a FAT partition which both systems can read and write too

[John A]

But if you want to swap files between windows and linux you should really use something like a FAT partition which both systems can read and write too

The problem is that Microsoft has made partition conversion on Windows a one-way process. When they came out with the FAT32 filesystem, the versions of Windows that followed came with a converter that would convert the older FAT16 filesystem into FAT32. However, once this conversion was complete, the only way to go back was to repartition the drive.

Same goes for NTFS. Windows XP comes with a NTFS converter so that you can convert the older FAT32 filesystem to NTFS, but once the conversion is complete, there's no easy way to change it back. And although the Linux team is probably working hard right now to make writing to NTFS partitions stable and reliable, it's currently not an option right now.

[chunkmartinez]

Hey THANX, this really helped. Good thing i didnt try to swap files or anything!