NTFS Mounting

Forum: DSL Embedded
Topic: NTFS Mounting
started by: gkterry

Posted by gkterry on Aug. 03 2005,04:10

I am not a newbie to Linux. In the past I have been the sysadmin for several years of a 4 network that had 4 Linux servers I set up with access to MAC and PC clients. However, that was over 18 months ago and I haven't used Linux since then until lately. DSL Linux has intrigued me but I am having difficulty accessing ntfs partitions. Read only mode is what I want. My ntfs partition should be hda1 and hda2. Does DSL change those partitions to another designation? When I attempt to mount /dev/hda1, I get the following message:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1 or too many mounted file systems.

I would appreciate any help clearing out the cobwebs.

Thanks!

Greg Terry

Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 03 2005,04:37

To see what partitions have been autodetected by DSL, open an Xterminal and type:

mount

To do the actual mounting, you should be able to just type something like:

mount /mnt/hda1

Or, as root, you can manually specify the whole process:

sudo su
mkdir /mnt/hda1
mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

Keep in mind that your NTFS partition might not be in the expected location. This is especially true for Dells and other PC manufacturers that create a small hidden FAT partition at the beginning of the hard drive that contain the Dell diagnostic utilities. So in this case, the NTFS partition would actually be at /dev/hda2

If DSL does not autodetect your drives on a newer computer, it may be due to limited support for SATA disk controllers. Try and go into your BIOS and set your SATA controller for "legacy mode" or "PATA mode" or "OS install mode" and then try booting DSL again.

Or you could download user tronik's unofficial DSL remaster that included linux kernel version 2.4.27 and full SATA support.

Hopefully, some of this information will be helpful.

Posted by DeeJay on Aug. 03 2005,10:25

Is it relevant that this is posted in the 'Embedded' thread? I think that I am right in saying that QEMU, which hosts the embedded version of DSL on a Windows PC, does not give/allow any access to physical filestore on the host machine, whatever the partition type. Might this be the underlying problem?

Posted by gkterry on Aug. 03 2005,13:14

I had previously went through all the mount gymnastics. I haven't forgotten that much yet.

there are only 3 drives listed at mount command:

/dev/root on /
/dev/hda on /KNOPPIX
/ramdisk on /ramdisk

I'm beginning to think that DeeJay may be correct and this is a normal occurence with the embedded version DSL. I'll try making a CD of the ISO version later and see if that behaves differently.

Greg

Posted by NTFS on Aug. 03 2005,15:00

mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

works for me. That is my windowsXP drive. I mount it often.

if /dev/hda1 doesn't work try /dev/hdb or maybe even do a

dmesg | grep "hd*" | more

Posted by kopsis on Aug. 03 2005,15:31

DeeJay is right -- if you're running DSL "on top" of Windows (using QEMU as opposed to booting off USB stick or CD-ROM) then you'll have no direct visibility to your Windows filesystem (regardless of format). The way to get around that is to "share" one or more of the directories in Windows and then use smbclient or the samba.dsl extension in DSL to mount the shared dirs as "network" drives over QEMU's virtual network connection.

Posted by mstrhelix on Aug. 07 2005,01:50

Really if you want access to your NTFS physical disk under embedded?

All you have to do is setup an FTP SERVER on windows and run it. Then use axyFTP GUI in DSL or just use

ftp from command line...

You also need to know the ip address of you windows box.

ftp my.win.ip.number

axyFTP is simple to setup and has a GUI for noobs.

login to dsl and you can access the whole drive like I DO :P
:cool:

Posted by lra on Aug. 07 2005,09:38

the latest version of qemu allows access to the cdrom

-cdrom /dev/cdrom

in windows.

i have also read that it allows read only access to hard drives though can't seem to find this info again!

EDIT: < http://www.qemu.org/faq.html >

Can I use a real disk, floppy or CDROM in QEMU ?
Yes, at least with Linux. For the floppy, use /dev/fd0 as image filename. For the cdrom, use /dev/cdrom. For a real hard disk, first ensure that you have read-only permission to the device (it is very dangerous to leave write access to the device because in case of problems you can trash your hard disk). Then use /dev/hda to use the hard disk 0. As QEMU will have read-only access to the device, all the changes will be discarded at the end of the QEMU session. For more safety if you do not know the access rights of the hard disk device, always use the -snapshot option:

qemu -snapshot /dev/hda

Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 08 2005,02:42

As far as I know, it is not possible to directly access your hardware on your MSWindows HOST computer via your virtual DSL embedded PC that is inside QEMU.

It might be possible to access cdrom or floppy somehow using a newer version but raw hard drive access is unlikely.

Posted by mstrhelix on Aug. 08 2005,04:03

Like I posted above. I access my winXP NTFS hard drive every day using axyFTP. I can boot embedded DSL, start my FTP-server on windows. Use axyFTP on embedded and then connect to the ftp server which is actually my hard drive in windows.
And this is all done VIA DSL-embedded.

Posted by Dongle on Aug. 15 2005,05:53

I have a crashed windows system - can I used cdrom based linux to move files around on my PC - i have two physical hard drives on my sustem and eight partitions.

Posted by mstrhelix on Aug. 15 2005,20:49

YES you should be able to boot into DSL and do what you are asking.... boot dsl and do

mount

at the prompt to see what is mounted...
then if you want you can mount the partitions that don't show up in mount.