will I be able to read an NTFS partition?

[dhecker]

hello - I read the nhf's but wasn't able to find this information:

I have a WinXP machine which I want to convert to RedHat. I'm a linux newbie but a good Win admin.

I have a second drive on this machine, formatted NTFS. I've got lots of archival stuff on there, and most of my other machines back up to it, etc. Once I get linux running, I need to share out this drive so everyone can continue backup up to it.

QUESTION:

The extra drive is in NTFS. Will RedHat be able to see it? Does this require additional setup/drivers, etc? I can't lose access to the data on the second drive for more than a day or two so I'm trying to plan accordingly!

Any advice appreciated.

thanks,

[michaelk]

RH does not include NTFS support in their default install kernel. You will have to enable support and recompile the kernel. However, write support is still experimental and not recommended.

If you are dual booting having the backup drive as FAT32 will allow linux and XP to access it without any problems. If not dual boot then you could convert it to a linux partition. With samba loaded the other PC's will not notice the difference.

[trekker]

If you have NTFS support compiled in your kernel, you should be able to mount your NTFS partitions with

"mount -t ntfs /dev/hd?? /mnt/ntfs"

Just replace the ?? with the correct letters and numbers for your setup.

To make it permanent, you will have to edit your /etc/fstab and add in the new entry.

HTH :D