OK, so I''ve got two hard drives in my computer, one running WinXP Pro, and the other running Redhat 8.0. I use GRUB as my bootloader, and everything''s peachy. So my question is: is there a way to access the WinXP hard drive when I''m running Linux? I''d really like to be able to access those mp3s, but I have no idea if Samba would be able to do this. If it can, could someone point me in the right direction? P.S. I don''t really except there to be a solution for the opposite situation. Last time I checked, Windows wasn''t really buddy-buddy with Linux. Thanks!

All you have to do is mount your other hard drive. Chances are, since you''re on redhat, it does this for you automatically, you''ll just have to find it. If not, you''ll want to edit your /etc/fstab file to be able to access the XP hard drive. If it''s FAT32, this is trivial, but keep in mind you have to specify the uid for winnt filesystems, if you want anyone other than root to be able to read it.

Check out man mount for details.

If your WinXP is on an NTFS partition, you''ll be able to see it, but not write to it (although there is an experimental kernel module that can let you do this....but there''s a warning that it can corrupt the partition, so me personally, I''d avoid it). More than likely, if you installed WinXp first, it was installed on /dev/hda1 and any other partitions you created (d:\drives etc) will be /dev/hda2 etc.

These get converted by your /etc/fstab file to be automounted to a file directory. Mine looks like this:

/dev/hda7 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hda5 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdc,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/cdrom2 supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/nt ntfs iocharset=iso8859-1,ro,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda2 /mnt/nt2 ntfs iocharset=iso8859-1,ro,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda3 /mnt/nt3 ntfs iocharset=iso8859-1,ro,umask=0 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0

Notice how the /mnt/nt file systems have at the end an "ro" identifier? That means it''s read-only (ditto for my CD-drives). Since you have two hard drives, you''ll see something that says /dev/hdb (which means the 2nd IDE drive...the letter means what drive it is, and the # means what partition on that drive).

If you have a FAT32 partition, then you can read and write to it. If you only have that one computer, your only other option that I know of is to get a program called VMware. It used to be freeware, but I think they charge for it now, but you might be able to find some older versions floating around. VMware lets you run multiple OS''es concurrently, so you can run WinXP and Linux at the same time. However, each takes up its own memory space, so you need lots of memory.

Samba is used for file sharing between networked computers...so if you had a 2nd computer, one with WinXP and the other running Linux...you COULD copy files from your Linux box to the WinXP machine even though WinXP is using NTFS.

Hey, thanks guys, I got my mp3s in Linux now!

I googled around a bit, and it turns out that there was an RPM that enabled NTFS support in Redhat (no reboot or kernel recompile required!). I''ll modify the /etc/fstab file when I get a chance.

Thanks for your help.

Yah that RPM rocks... it''s this one?
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.html

I installed it a couple days ago for a friend.



MatrixCubed
http://MatrixCubed.cjb.net