Cant save to hard drive?

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Cant save to hard drive?
started by: oasis13

Posted by oasis13 on Oct. 26 2005,09:58

Hi,
im running dsl from the live cd and i cant save to my harddrive. I only have 1 harddrive (hda1) which i have mounted and i can open files from it (i.e mp3s) but i cant save onto it. This also means i cant save my settings which is very annoying. Does anyone have any help?

my hd is a 40gb ntfs hd.

Thanks!

Posted by JustoTech on Oct. 26 2005,11:53

The only LiveCD I've ever heard of that could save to NTFS is the newest version of Knoppix. Typically, Linux and NTFS fight like cats and dogs and have a lot of fun even seeing each other.

The only way you'll be able to get anything on that hard drive is to repartition with a FAT and a NTFS partition. Linux can right to FAT with little to no issues at all.

You may either do that or just go buy a cheap HDD (Garage Sales) and format it as FAT so that you can save stuff to it and copy to your NTFS partition in Winders.

Posted by brianw on Oct. 26 2005,13:49

When it is mounted it is probably mounted read only (ro) try using
mount -t vfat -rw /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 (or where ever you mount it now).

If it is not read only you probably need root access to save files to that drive. If you are trying to copy something there try "sudo cp <filename> <destination>" for other commands try using the sudo first to see if that works.

Posted by mikshaw on Oct. 26 2005,14:36

Brian: it's NTFS...it won't mount that way.

Justo is correct. You're not going to be able to write to NTFS from DSL no matter how it's mounted. You could try getting something like captiveNTFS installed (i can't help you there, but i assume it's possible)...but you will likely not get the same performance that you would with a native linux filesystem.

Posted by oasis13 on Oct. 26 2005,17:27

damn!

cheers for the help though! Do you think this will be possible in future versions of dsl?

Posted by brianw on Oct. 26 2005,22:29

Quote (mikshaw @ Oct. 26 2005,10:36)

Brian: it's NTFS...it won't mount that way.

Sorry, totally missed that. Thanks. Should have noticed that, it was NTFS and an XP install that trashed my laptop linux partition before I went completely to DSL (guess I should thank Bill for pushing me completely away).

Posted by jerry on Oct. 27 2005,22:09

I will show you how in M$ , way , you can do it with linux too.
step 1, ( yah , backup first ,as always)
defrag target drive
when done make sure you have plenty of free space, like 5 gig.
2: using PM8 or PM8 for dos,
resize partition, so you have a little 2gig partition at the end of your big disk.
3.) now format it with fat32.
Never shrink you NTFS partition less then 33% as the MFT is in the center and PM8 , sometimes kills it with 50% resize.
good luck.

Posted by bluestrattos on Nov. 03 2005,20:02

I'm in a fat partitions, so linux is able to read/write in her. My problem is i've DSL running in a fat partition but he still not saving.
When i end everything is lost, configurations, downloaded files, enabling apt-get everytime. Why dsl don't save in the hdd ?

Another questions is that i can't mount any windows partition, i try mount.... nothing, but at leas i'd like to know how can i put dsl saving in the hdd.

I'd like to be on windows and yet running linux, in this case DSL ;)

Thank you

Bluestrattos

Posted by bluestrattos on Nov. 03 2005,20:04

double post. sorry

Posted by AwPhuch on Nov. 03 2005,20:48

1. Do a frugal HD install
a. Using CFdisk create 3 new partitions behind the NTFS ONE
1. 1st partition 50-60MB (for DSL CD IMAGE)
2. 2nd partition is swap (however big 2x RAM)
3. 3rd parition is the rest for persistant /home /opt and backup dir (remember the drive designators /dev/hda2-3-4 or whatever)

2. Boot into DSL and using the rightclick option hit install frugal to HD (make sure you remembered the drive numbers)

3. Once installed *dont reboot* rightclick again and install grub boot loader

4. You should now be able to reboot and have both the DSL and the Windows be able to boot since grub writes itself to the MBR which isnt NTFS

5. Enjoy

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by bluestrattos on Nov. 03 2005,23:27

but i don't want install grub/lilo. So far i'm in Windows and i just execute dsl-windows.bat file and i was in dsl. The problem is that i can't save files on disk, even in a simple fat partition.I want to be able to write on the hdd

Posted by Xavier on Nov. 13 2005,08:03

I'm having a similar problem, I'm running the latest live CD (as of nov 1 2005) of DSL. I boot it with no problems. I have a FAT32 formatted windows2000 HD (hda1). If I use the GUI mount tool on the desktop, the switch turns green but I can't see the HD from any program. I also tried opening a terminal screen and using:

sudo su
mount/dev/hda1

It responsds:

bash:mount/dev/hda1: No such file or directory

What am I doing wrong?

Posted by oasis13 on Nov. 13 2005,10:35

Open the mp3 player. Click "open file". Browse right back to the start and then click mount/hda1. It should be there

Posted by mikshaw on Nov. 13 2005,20:19

The command is not "mount/dev/hda1"; it's "mount /dev/hda1". Note the space....mount<whitespace>device.

Posted by mephisto_ee on Nov. 15 2005,20:54

bluestrattos,

It sounds like you are running DSL from windows. I believe you can't save or copy files into fat or windows partition (hda1) while running DSL within windows. there is workaround, you can use samba and mount share windows dir.

Posted by bluestrattos on Nov. 15 2005,23:11

Quote (Guest @ Nov. 15 2005,15:54)

i didn't want to write to hda1 i want it to write to hda2, that it was the DSL partition that i created specially for him. But now wverything's ok

I was able to get things all working