GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home Preface Advocacy History Distributions Installation Basic Survival Wajig Audio AbiWord APM Backup Bash Booting Cameras CD Chinese ChRoot Clock Commercial Conference Management Configuration CRON CVS Databases DIA Directories Disks Documentation DVD Email Eye of Gnome Evolution File Systems Firewalls Floppy Disks Fonts Ghemical GIMP Glade Gnome GnuCash Gnumeric GQView Graphics Groups HTML Editors ImageMagick Initialisations on Booting Java KDE Kernels Keyboard Konqueror KVM Switch LaTeX Log System Login Magellan Mathematics Memory Modems Mounting Devices MS/Windows Music MySQL Nautilus Networks NFS NT File System OpenOffice.org Oracle Packages Partitions Passwords PDF Photos PPP Presentations Printing Python R Remote Desktops Rsync Samba Scanning Science Security SH File System Sketch Spell SPlus Spruce SSH SUDO Subversion Swap Themes USB Video Virtualization Web Word X XML Sample Installations Troubleshooting Index

NT File System

Kernel 2.2.12 and beyond support read only access to NTFS, the file system of MS/Windows/NT. The kernel needs to be configured to use it:

CONFIG_NTFS_FS=m

I have two NTFS partitions on the MS/Windows/NT side of the machine. So I edit /etc/fstab to include these two lines:

/dev/hda1       /nt/c          ntfs  defaults,user,ro,umask=002,gid=100 0 0
/dev/hda2       /nt/d          ntfs  defaults,user,ro,umask=002,gid=100 0 0

The various options mean: `ro' mounts the file system as read-only; `user' lets any user mount the file-system; `nohide' shows hidden and associated files; 'noexec' avoids regular files showing up as non-executable.

Then create directories for the mount points:

# mkdir /nt/c
# mkdir /nt/d

As any user can then mount the drives:

# mount /nt/c
# mount /nt/d

These will be mounted each time you reboot, unless you add the `noauto' option to the appropriate lines in /etc/fstab.

Users are granted access to [NTFS]/nt/c and [NTFS]/nt/d through the use of the umask=002,gid=100 in the /etc/fstab, and then add trusted users to this group. You can allow access for only a specific user by adding "uid=1000,gid=1000" to the options. Or you can remove all security and give complete access to everyone with umask=000 (this is dangerous as any login will be able to peruse your possibly private and password containing files on the NTFS partition).

Note that permissions on the mountpoint itself ([NTFS]/nt/c are irrelevant: when you mount a filesystem the permissions of the mounted filesystem's root directory replace the permissions of the mountpoint, even when the filesystem in question does not support permissions.

If you need to transfer files from your linux partition to your NTFS partition then Explore2fs is an option. Have a look at http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm