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mrjamin

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 6, 2003
1,161
1
Strongbadia
After getting well and truly hacked off with Windows, i decided to dual-boot my PC with XP Pro and Mandrake 9.1. The install was a doddle, took about 25mins. Mandrake was great, so much better than windows in so many ways. My only problem was that i couldnt seem to access my other hardrive (partitioned - one partition holding XP + programs, and the other with all my docs, mp3s, DivX etc). Any help would be appreciated, I wondered whether it's because Linux might not be able to deal with NTFS partitions. Could this be the case? I'm new to Linux, so go easy on me!
 
Re: Mandrake Linux help

Originally posted by mrjamin
I wondered whether it's because Linux might not be able to deal with NTFS partitions. Could this be the case? I'm new to Linux, so go easy on me!

I'm pretty sure Linux can read NTFS partitions, just not write to them.

Mandrake 9.1 has the ability to resize NTFS partitions (works great, BTW) so it's not totally alienated from your Windows partition.

I think you have to mount the NTFS drive/pattition in order to read from it, but I'm not sure exactly how to do that.

I'll look around though.

Edit:http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/
 
I'm not sure of your question.

Are you saying you want to access the partion that has Windows and your windows files while your booted into Mandrake?

Or do you want to know how to get back into Windows now that you have installed Mandrake?
 
NTFS support in Linux was read-only last time I checked. First you need to make sure NTFS support is compiled into your kernel or available as a module. The command "dmesg | grep NTFS" will check to see if it's loaded. If it's not loaded you'll have to check the /lib/modules/whatever directory containing your kernel modules and see if there's one in there for NTFS, then load it with insmod or depmod.

Once you've got NTFS loaded into the kernel, you would issue the command 'mount -t ntfs <filesystem> <mount point>', where <filesystem> is /dev/hda3 or whatever, and <mount point> is the subdirectory in which you want the filesystem to appear in your directory tree. Whether or not there's an easy graphical Mandrake way to do that, I don't know.

Ahhhhh..... Linux: Difficult Solutions to Easy Problems.
 
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