help me access NTFS partitions from Mandrake

silverside

Hi
I want to delete some files on a NTFS WinXP partition from within mandrake. (mandrake 10 fresh installation with defaults)

IN KDE explorer I can see the hard drives but they just come up as 'system blocks' or something like that.

What do I need to do to let me edit the contents of NTFS partitions?

I know this is a beginners question but I just need to do this quickly; I don't need to understand/learn Linux at this stage

Thanks for your help

hostyle

I'm not sure what you mean by "IN KDE explorer I can see the hard drives but they just come up as 'system blocks' or something like that." I can see my NTFS partitions just fine under Mandrake, since installing - /mnt/win_d, /mnt/win_e and so on. Is thsi what you mean? They are read-only though.

You can change this permanently in /etc/fstab, but are probably better off not to do it permanently. Instead, log in as root, unmount the partition in question, remount it as writable.

I'll explain in more detail (just in case something else is out of order before I do) if you can confirm that your NTFS partition in question is appearing in the form /mnt/win_c, and give the name it is mounted under ie. /mnt/win_? <- fill in the question mark.

Typedef

Write access to NTFS is not permitted past some really broken version of NTFS in NT 4.0 or 3.5 I think.

Actually fair play to the NTFS driver authors for reverse engineering *that* level of support.

silverside

I know very little about kde so excuse my ignorance.

I type in //dev/hde into the title bar and I can see N partitions, but not the data they contain.

I know there is a concept of 'mounting' hard drives but I don't even know how to do that.

If you tell me to RTFM, fair enough, but could you point me in the right direction ?

nadir

yes why read the manual when nadir can read it for you

in /etc/fstab you would have a line like this

/dev/sda3 /mnt/windows vfat ro,auto,umask=000,quiet 0 0

mounting works like mount /devicename /location

so to mount that from command line instead, you would use something like

mount /dev/hda1 -t ntfs -o ro,auto,umask=000,quiet /mnt/windows

so have a look through the manual and understand how i came up with that, its pretty simple really, of course you need to be root to do that, and like typedef says you cant write to ntfs

ro is for read only if you were mounting fat, you would have -t vfat -o ro,blah,blah,blah and so on.

btw KDE is only a window manager, and as such just sits on X which is the graphical server, gnome, fluxbox, etc are all the same, this is unix stuff, and has nothing to do with KDE you use console/bash/terminal whatever for all this intefacing/mainteance stuffs.
bleh

silverside

thanks nadir

sounds too complicated for me especially if I cant even write anything. I was hoping for a graphical tool which would set it all up for me and emulate NTFS writing also.

nadir

graphics are for loosers
unless your playing framebuffer ascii UT that is
btw its not complicated ata ll, dive straight in and have phun

Cake Fiend

Why can't you delete the files from within XP?
If you can't boot your XP installation, maybe you could boot off the XP CD, enter the recovery console and see if you can delete the files through that?

Also, the reason you think linux is tricky is because it's different. Give yourself an hour to learn the basics, and you'll see that it's not necessarily all that complicated.

/me rabbits on about the bad old days, repartitioning through the CLI, etc.

maxheadroom

diskdrake will set up the partitions so you can mount them easily enough. But you won't be able to write to the drive using mandrake because they haven't reverse engineered NTFS enough yet.

If you really, realy must delete the files from inside linux, get knoppix, and use the "captive" drivers installation tool - this is a graphical wizard that installs the windows XP NTFS drivers into the knoppix session and lets you read / write the NTFS partition.

albertw

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

Captive: The first free NTFS read/write filesystem for GNU/Linux.

Project implements the first full read/write free access to NTFS disk drives. You can mount your Microsoft Windows NT, 200x or XP partition as a transparently accessible volume for your GNU/Linux.

This compatibility was achieved in the Wine way by using the original Microsoft Windows ntfs.sys driver. It emulates the required subsystems of the Microsoft Windows kernel by reusing one of the original ntoskrnl.exe, ReactOS parts, or this project's own reimplementations, on a case by case basis. Project includes the first open source MS-Windows kernel API for Free operating systems. Involvement of the original driver files was chosen to achieve the best and unprecedented filesystem compatibility and safety.

As opposed to other projects this is currently the only software supporting the full read/write access including the possibility to create/delete files, modify directories etc.

silverside

I'll try captive.

Recovery console won't work because my floppy drive won't read my SATA drivers for some reason.

Booting from a Windows IDE HD doesnt work for some unknown reason, again to do with the SATA drivers somehow.