slave drive partitions

[mahdaeng]

first of all, i'm pretty new to linux and completely new to fedora core - i just installed it this weekend

the machine i installed it on was a win2k box before with two hard drives (master and slave)

this is NOT a dual-boot setup because the whole point was to get rid of windows completely

i installed fedora on the primary hard drive, resulting in three partitions: hda1, hda2, and hda3

the slave hard drive also has three partitions on it and contains data that i want to preserve

so, during the fedora install i didn't touch the slave drive - i didn't want to accidentally wipe out its data

the install (as a personal desktop, by the way) went just fine, but now fedora only sees the first partition of the slave drive - the other two are apparently invisible to it

i popped in a knoppix cd, out of curiosity, and was able to see and access all three of the slave drives partitions without a problem

my question is: how can i access all of the partitions on that slave drive from fedora?

thanks in advance

[Jman]

Originally posted by mahdaeng
first of all, i'm pretty new to linux and completely new to fedora core - i just installed it this weekend

this is NOT a dual-boot setup because the whole point was to get rid of windows completely

Good for you. :)

Because it was win2k, those partitions were probably formatted in NTFS. NTFS support doesn't come with Fedora. You can download the rpms to install from here (http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/fedora1.html) The links at the left should help if you get lost, especially the instructions (http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/instructions.html) .

Note that this is only gets you read access; writing a NTFS partition is very tricky and it hasn't been reverse engineered fully yet.

[mahdaeng]

thanks, Jman, for your suggestion - i'll give it a try as soon as i can and then report back on how everything went

a question though - you said:

Note that this is only gets you read access; writing a NTFS partition is very tricky and it hasn't been reverse engineered fully yet.

does that mean i COULD conceivably write to the disk but that i might screw something up if i did?

i'd really like to be able to continue to write to the disk

what if i installed it into one of my windows machines as a slave and then just write to it over my lan from the linux box? would that work?

thanks again!

[Bana]

Hmm, your slave idea would technically work yes, you would need to use samba to set it up correctly.

About ntfs write support I better quote or otherwise I might make somebody mad :)
There are two drivers, currently. The original driver, in 2.4 has some write code in it, but it is extremely dangerous to use it. The possibility of destroying your filesystem is very high.

The new driver, introduced in 2.5.11, has some write code, but it's very limited. The driver can overwrite existing files, but it cannot change the length, add new or delete existing files.
...
From http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs.html#3.2
If you read there it describes another way to write (copying from within windows). But your best bet is probably to just use your network copying of which you spoke.

[mahdaeng]

hmmm...

thanks, Bana - i think that's the route i'll have to go if i want to continue fully using the drive

[mhelios]

I agree with Bana's advice; Using Samba to accomplish this would be much safer at this point then using rw NTFS.

Setting as RESOLVED.