Access of external USB in Mandriva

Hi, can anyone please tell me how I might be able to permanently access the Windows files on my external USB drive when I'm in Mandriva? I have had partial success by doing the following - which I researched via a few websites:

Go - Mandriva Control Center – Mount Points – Create, Delete and Resize Hard Drive Partitions. then by selecting the external disk, then clicking Unmount - 'Toggle to Expert Mode' - Options – then put a check in the 'Unmask=0' Box – click Okay – Mount – click Done - you are then asked if you would like to 'Save' the modifications -click Yes.

Having done this, I can access all the Windows files on the external drive. However, when I shutdown Mandriva or boot into Windows then return to Mandriva, I cannot access the external drive – I get an “Unable to Mount External Drive” error message.

I have tried to change the permissions for write access for the external disk, but just keep getting an “Access Denied” error message.

Cheers,

Dave

 

This issue would best be resolved with manually editing the /etc/fstab file to make a permanent mount point. Read this

It should only take a single click of the mouse to mount the drive anyway. Why do you need to automount it? This is not the *nix way of doing things, only windows works that way by default.

 

Post the contents of your /etc/fstab and I can make suggestions on how to implement this.

 

Thanks very much AT. I will post them as soon as I can.

Dave.

 

Update:

Since starting this thread I have ran the Mandriva update script successfully. However, The mentioned external drive now does not show up at all in Mandriva 'Devices'. If I go into The MCC, the partition appears as if it is unformatted (blanked out, no description text in its box). I'm obviously very new to Linux, but I would think this section ("Create, Delete and Resize Hard Drive Partitions") is the equivalent of XP's "Disk Management." Any thoughts on how I can proceed in order to get the external disk functioning in Mandriva with this latest event in mind?

I was thinking that I could format it in Mandriva and that would do the trick. I would of course, have to transfer all its file contents in XP first, as I don't want to lose the data on the disk, but this could be easily done if I go back into XP and copy the contents over to my main HD.

Cheers,

Dave

 

David, as AT says, can you post the contents of your /etc/fstab please.

Just type the following into a terminal:

Code:

kate /etc/fstab

And paste the contents here

 

You need to have root access to read/write in /etc.
You can run KATE as root by using the run command (F2) and select 'run as different user'.
This will get you into it.

What is the partition formated as? FAT or NTFS?
You shouldn't need to format this drive in mandriva for it to see the partition.
Did you reboot after running the update script?

 

Thanks, guys.

Here are the contents of the fstab according to Kate:

Code:

/dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdb6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-15,ro 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0

kenji san - the partition is formatted in NTFS, and no, I did not reboot after running the update script.

Thanks for your help guys -always appreciated.

 

Once you reboot you should be able to see the partition again. Anytime you do a big update it doesn't really take effect until you reboot and until you do it can cause problems.

Do you have any problems accessing /dev/hda1?

Also, I may be stating the obvious here but make sure that you boot up with the external drive powered on so it is seen when autodetecting hardware.

 

Thanks for the help. No, I can fully access /dev/hda1, no problems whatsoever, and yes, the external drive is powered-on on boot-up.

 

I have recently discovered - if the research I came up with is accurate - that you can't add or change permissions to a read only filesystem (all the Windows files on my external disk come up as 'read only').

Not to mention also, that Windows partitions wont take permissions. Additonally, a drive formatted in NTFS cannot be written to - it has to be formatted in FAT 32 or 16.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of these statements. However, the above may well explain the difficulty I have had in trying to access my external drive in Mandriva, as when I go to change permissions, I get "Access Denied" errors.

 

I don't know about mandriva, but most *nixes don't have reliable write support for NTFS. This files system is badly supported by anything other than the dreaded microsoft because it is shit. FAT was the best file system ever to come out of MS but it is still nothing compared to EXT3, reiserFS, UFS, etc.

If you must use NTFS, you are going to run into problems but that doesn't mean that it won't ever work. Read about this project.

You can check the feature list for mandriva and see if they show write support for NTFS.