Tutorial
So you've got your rad new distro, be it Redhat, Suse, Debian, Slackware, etc., but now you want to see your Window partition. No problem! The cool thing about Linux is you can make it so Fat or NTFS, or any other type of partition, look like a folder.
The first step is to make a folder. A lot of people like to make the folder /mnt/X, where X is the drive, but i prefer /Windows/X, so I'm going to use that for this example. First type mkdir /Windows then mkdir /Windows/C in a console (command line). For this example I'll be mounting the C drive, but do whatever drive you'd like.
The second step if to figure out what the Linux representation of the partition that you'll be using is. In Linux these are represented as /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, /dev/hdb1, /dev/hdc1, etc. Most commonly a Windows partition is /dev/hda1, but just to make sure, run the command fdisk -l in a console and find the Windows partition you want to mount. For this tutorial I'm going to use /dev/hda1.
Next we get to the actual mounting. Open /etc/fstab in your favorite text editor. If your Windows partition is Fat32 add this line to the end:
/dev/hda1 /Windows/C vfat users,owner,ro,umask=000 0 0
replacing /dev/hda1 and/or /Windows/C if needed. If your Windows partition is NTFS then add this to it:
/dev/hda1 /Windows/C ntfs users,owner,ro,umask=000 0 0
replacing /dev/hda1 and/or /Windows/C if needed.
Now we are at our final step. In a console type mount -a. This mounts everything in /etc/fstab. Your Windows partitions will be mounted whenever you start Linux.
If you ever want to unmount these partitions, just remove these lines from /etc/fstab and type umount /dev/had1 (yes, umount not unmount). Replacing /dev/hda1 if necessary.
The first step is to make a folder. A lot of people like to make the folder /mnt/X, where X is the drive, but i prefer /Windows/X, so I'm going to use that for this example. First type mkdir /Windows then mkdir /Windows/C in a console (command line). For this example I'll be mounting the C drive, but do whatever drive you'd like.
The second step if to figure out what the Linux representation of the partition that you'll be using is. In Linux these are represented as /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, /dev/hdb1, /dev/hdc1, etc. Most commonly a Windows partition is /dev/hda1, but just to make sure, run the command fdisk -l in a console and find the Windows partition you want to mount. For this tutorial I'm going to use /dev/hda1.
Next we get to the actual mounting. Open /etc/fstab in your favorite text editor. If your Windows partition is Fat32 add this line to the end:
/dev/hda1 /Windows/C vfat users,owner,ro,umask=000 0 0
replacing /dev/hda1 and/or /Windows/C if needed. If your Windows partition is NTFS then add this to it:
/dev/hda1 /Windows/C ntfs users,owner,ro,umask=000 0 0
replacing /dev/hda1 and/or /Windows/C if needed.
Now we are at our final step. In a console type mount -a. This mounts everything in /etc/fstab. Your Windows partitions will be mounted whenever you start Linux.
If you ever want to unmount these partitions, just remove these lines from /etc/fstab and type umount /dev/had1 (yes, umount not unmount). Replacing /dev/hda1 if necessary.
