Mageia forum

This some what complicated but here goes:

An older friend of mine, had a friend of his, try to install the kobo desktop on his xp pc.
She did not check the available space on c: and it filled up and xp went fubar'd and lost it's IP address.

I loan'd him a pc until we could get a larger hd, loaded xp sp1 like he had and it would not connect to shaw cable as they requir sp2.

The service people also informed us that no xp version windows will be allowed to connect in about 8 months.

He does not have allot of money and if he spends any to buy a new pc he is going to have windows 8 which will radicaly new for him so I figured why not let try linux (mageia 2) and now we get to the problem.

He had a second small drive with allot of files he wants to keep, so I have his new larger drive with linux on it and the smaller drive conected with ntfs on it.

I cannot access the ntfs drive, it shows up in Dolphin but when I try to click on it in the left selection panel the selection goes back to root.
If anybody has any suggestions it would be greatly appreciated, he is having a hard enough time (84) going to linux and it would be nice to be able to see the old drive.

Thanks roly

The solution is to make sure the ntfs-3g package is installed and that the ntfs-3g kernel module is being loaded. I am not sure of the process for that exactly, but that is the solution in a nut shell. Hopefully someone else here can guide you through it or you might be able to google information on ntfs-3g. That is the filesystem driver that allows Linux users to "see" ntfs files. - George

Check the entry for the partition in /etc/fstab. IIRC it should look something like this:

UUID=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx /mount-point ntfs-3g defaults,umask=000 0 0

where /mount-point is the directory where you want the partition to be mounted (for example, /mnt/old-files). If that directory does not exist, then you must create it.
(The UUID is, of course, specific to the partition in question.)

MCC - Local disks - Manage partitions, can help set this up correctly.

Jim

roly wrote:He had a second small drive with allot of files he wants to keep, so I have his new larger drive with linux on it and the smaller drive conected with ntfs on it.

I cannot access the ntfs drive, it shows up in Dolphin but when I try to click on it in the left selection panel the selection goes back to root.
If anybody has any suggestions it would be greatly appreciated, he is having a hard enough time (84) going to linux and it would be nice to be able to see the old drive.

Thanks roly

First things first:

How are the disks connected?

1. Are you booting an installation of Mageia on that machine or is it live? You said you had a larger disk with Linux on it..what does that mean?
2. try pressing ALT+F2 then type in:

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kdesu dolphin

then press ENTER
3. Key in your root password and check whether you can access the disk in Dolphin now.
4. If not open a Terminal and as root try:

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# ntfsck /dev/sda2

- change sda2 to your NTFS volume!!
5. If you have some error maybe you need to fix it through Windows

Please give organised details and explanation of the problem, machine setup, and everything since birth till now

First all let me thank everyone for their responces.

Now to answer some of the questions:
I am sure the drive is mounted and it's a permission problem = 2nd responder.

I am running a live version of mageia 2 on the large drive and I think the first reponder has given me the answer (ntfs-3g) and it in the Magiea sources for updates. = 3rd responder.

I will update his system with the ntfs-3g and if it works will mark mark this comment as solved.

Again thanks everyone. roly

One more question - From what i understood, you installed Mageia 2 on his box. What installation media did you use?
As ntfs-3g comes with the default install normally. Did you do some custom installation?

And the small ntfs drive you mentioned, is that a separate drive, internal or external?
As such problems only exist with internal drives/partitions. If it's what i think it is, then you should
also get a light red notification at the bottom of dolphin, above the status bar telling you the problem.

Does that happen?

I used a dvd with a burned iso image and the did all the updates.
I noticed ntfs-3g was on my system and so figured it was normal.
The small ntfs drive is internal on a IDE 1 cable. The mageia is on a SATA hookup..
I am not sure about the red notification I would have to go to his place and look, I do not remember seeing it, which I will do as soon as possible..
It shows up in Dolphin and shows the usage.

Okay, so what you need is one out of:
1. Fix the permissions so you can mount the drive as user: viewtopic.php?p=5136#p5136
2. If there's an fstab entry for that, you can also change that so that users can mount it - although i'm not sure if that fixes the problem.

Since quite some time, i'm using option 1. for my internal partitions.