I am here on behalf of my nephew, who went charging off and installed Fedora FC3 on his laptop without much in the way of preparation or reading of instructions!
He created one Linux partition using Partion Magic, and installed FC on that. It worked, and he has got a boot menu so he can choose between FC and WinXP. All well and good.
However he would like to see his Windows partition from Linux, and he can’t. Does he need to mount it?
Presumably the XP partition is NTFS? You need to download and install the linux-NTFS rpm from here: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/fedora3.html, making sure you get the correct one for the kernel he is running, and the processor type. Find the processor type by issuing the following command in a terminal:
rpm -q --queryformat "%{ARCH}
" kernel
… and
uname -r
to get the kernel version.
Now that FC3 is set up to be able to read NTFS, you want to find the relevant partition name that XP is on… the easiest way I’ve found to do this is to run the “Hardware Browser” utility (Applications>System Tools…). The attached screenshot of my Hardware Browser output shows I have two NTFS partitions, hda5 and had6.
Create a new directory called XP (or whatever you want) under the /mnt directory within Linux, then open the file /etc/fstab in a text editor and add the line:
/dev/hda?? /mnt/XP auto defaults 0 0
… where ?? is the partition number of the NTFS partition. You will see other examples of this already in fstab, don’t worry as it’s really straightforward.
The above line in fstab will ensure that the partition is mounted at boot time. To mount it straight away, again the easiest way is to run “Applications>System Tools>Disk Management”, click the relevant line and then the “Mount” button.
I’m not sure how much Linux you know so please forgive me if I’m teaching you to suck eggs… any questions, ask away
There are countless warnings about writing to NTFS partitions from Linux - support is “wobbly” in most flavours.
Read access doesn’t seem to have the same issues thankfully.
