NTFS Automount question

[fryem720]

I am completely new to Linux. I am running Fedora Core 1 on an HP zt1175 laptop. I have 2 main questions.

First, can anyone explain to me in easy-to-understand terms (keeping in mind my admitted cluelessness) how to set up my WinXP Home NTFS partition to automount? (I know read-only is safe and I don't plan on testing out any experimental software to let me write to NTFS).

Second, I have a 30 GB hard drive that I took out of an old system and put it in a drive enclosure. It's plugged into a USB 2.0 port on a PCMIA adapter. In WinXP, it sometimes is recognized at boot, most of the time it isn't but I can get it to work by uninstalling the USB Mass Storage driver and then running the Add Hardware Wizard. Why all the info on my WinXP set-up, you ask? Because I know the drive works, I just can't figure out how to get my FC1 to recognize and automount (much less just mount) it. Once again, can anyone explain how to deal with this in terms a moron like me can understand?

Thanks in advance.

[David]

http://fedora.artoo.net/faq/

A useful link for fed newbs and also contains a link to your ntfs problem, which I'll provide here anyway:

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/index.html

I'm not really qualified to help you on the second problem so I'll leave it there

[fjleal]

I'll try to help you on the second question:

I don't know if the USB via PCMCIA is recognized. But I have an external USB disk and to mount it (in /mnt/usb) I simply do (as root): mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb

If you want a normal user to be able to mount it, insert in your /etc/fstab something like:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usb vfat noauto,user,exec,rw,unhide 0 0

If you do that, any user can simply "mount /mnt/usb" to mount it.

To automount the device, edit your /etc/auto.master and uncomment the "/misc" line; then edit /etc/auto.misc and add this line:
usb -fstype=vfat,rw,user,exec :/dev/sda1

It'll auto mount the device inside /misc/usb. Of course you have to have the "autofs" service running. After changing the /etc/auto.xxxx files, do a "/sbin/service autofs restart" (as root).

[fryem720]

Thanks for the help. I'll try your advice. I guess I should have mentioned that my external usb hd is ntfs. How does that affect your response(s)?

[fjleal]

Simple. You must have the ntfs kernel module installed (get it from ntfs-linux.sf.net, like David mentioned), and use "mount -t nfts ..." instead of "mount -t vfat ..." for mount, or "-fstype=ntfs" for automount.