Newbie question - sharing files on dual-boot XP and FC3

Paul Howarth paul at city-fan.org
Fri Jan 21 10:09:04 UTC 2005


Bob Brennan wrote:
> I have tried many ways of sharing files between an XP NTFS partition
> and FC3 and have a few questions that I need help with:
> 
> I have 3 primary partitions set up by Partition Magic - XP NTFS,
> shared VFAT, and FC3. Despite man documents claiming Linux fully
> supports NTFS I find that FC3 reports "kernel does not support NTFS"
> on a mount command. So questions 1&2:
> 
> 1. Is there any way I can read/write my NTFS partition from FC3?

Read yes; writing is not very safe.

NTFS support is not included in Fedora Core for legal reasons. You can 
get the NTFS drivers as RPMs from:
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/index.html

See http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/rel26.html#limitations for 
details of write support.

> 2. If not, is a shared VFAT partition the best alternative?

This is the best way anyway.

> Now to the real problem. At the moment I am mounting the VFAT
> partition with an entry in fstab:
> /dev/hda6     /mnt/win     vfat    defaults        0 0
> Heeding the many warnings on this list about newbies running as root I
> tried to run as my user account accessing the shared partition (where
> all of my shared workfiles are) but have no permissions because both
> owner and group of all files is 'root'. I have tried chown, chgrp, (as
> root) and anything else I can think of but that does not work, I
> believe due to it being a VFAT drive mounted by root. I have tried all
> ways I can think of to mount as a user, all give me access and
> permission warnings. So the last question:
> 
> 3. How do I mount the VFAT partition so that an ordinary user can
> read/write to it?

See http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs.html#4.5 and the next 
few entries in that section.

Paul.




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