oldnoob Posted March 10, 2006 Report Share Posted March 10, 2006 I have recently purchased an external 250gb hard drive. I have formatted it NTFS as I want to be able to share it with my friends who are not linux users (yet) I have a duel boot pc, Xp & 10.1. Under linux I just want any user to be able to mount it READ ONLY as it only contains music. When I switch it on, it appears on the desktop, but when I try to access it a message appears "mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1, or too many mounted file systems please check that the disk is entered correctly" When the drive is switched on my fstab is as below /dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 /dev/hdb8 /home ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/hda7 /mnt/50gig ext3 defaults 1 2 //lappy/SharedDocs /mnt/SharedDocs smbfs user,username=Pete,noauto 0 0 /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0 none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850 0 0 /dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-15,ro 0 0 /dev/hdb6 /mnt/win_c2 vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0 /dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0 /dev/hda6 /mnt/win_e vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/hdb7 /usr ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0 /dev/sda1 /mnt/removable auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,kudzu,codepage=850,noauto,exec,users 0 0 I have searched through the hardware forum and have found similar topics but I am still unsure, so I thought it safer to ask. CAUTION NOVICE HERE Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted March 11, 2006 Report Share Posted March 11, 2006 /dev/sda1 /mnt/removable auto... What happens if you change it to /dev/sda1 /mnt/removable ntfs... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oldnoob Posted March 11, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 11, 2006 I get exactly the same error message. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oldnoob Posted March 13, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 13, 2006 After more research, it seems external ntfs hard drives dont mix well with 10.1 What about 2005LE, can anyone read external ntfs hard drives in 2005LE?? Are there any other solutions to sharing an 250gb external drive with windows and linux even if linux is read only?? I'm not really interested in fat32 as I dont want 8 partitions and the 4gb file barrier could be a problem sometimes. Any tips would be appreciated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted March 13, 2006 Report Share Posted March 13, 2006 why would you need 8 partitions if you used fat32? fat32 doesn't have a partition size limit, despite what windows tells you. the partition size limit that windows places on fat32 partitions is just there to force people to use NTFS, I personally have an external drive formatted fat32 that's a 150GB partition. You just have to create it from within Linux ;) however, it does have a 4gb file size barrier. ntfs should be readable in 2005LE (in fact, it should be readable in 10.1 AFAIK, but I guess I'm wrong!). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michaelcole Posted March 13, 2006 Report Share Posted March 13, 2006 2006 reads NTFS.. for sure.. I use FAT32 for sharing therefore i have no problem with writing or reading with any computer win98 - win2000 and others plus linux.. I have a USB 80GB External and only 4Gb for my shareable files, I dont need any more the rest is all Linux Based data, which i will never use in windows.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oldnoob Posted March 13, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 13, 2006 Thanks for the quick replies tyme & michaelcole Fat32 might be the answer, being able to write will be a definate advantage and the 4gb file limit I guess I can do without. I do however seem to remember something about fat32 having fragmenting problems in windows but I am probably wrong. Should I format from within MCC? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michaelcole Posted March 13, 2006 Report Share Posted March 13, 2006 I used MCC.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted March 13, 2006 Report Share Posted March 13, 2006 I do however seem to remember something about fat32 having fragmenting problems in windows but I am probably wrong. both NTFS and FAT32 can get fragmented, but if you are only storing data files (i.e. not programs) it won't be much of an issue - windows moves program files around for quicker access when starting applications, but data files don't get fragmented as quickly. you can always defragment it from windows if you need to. Should I format from within MCC? that would probably be the easiest way :) fdisk and cfdisk are both good tools in linux, but are command-line only and may be a little less...intuitive than mcc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted March 13, 2006 Report Share Posted March 13, 2006 After more research, it seems external ntfs hard drives dont mix well with 10.1 What about 2005LE, can anyone read external ntfs hard drives in 2005LE?? Are there any other solutions to sharing an 250gb external drive with windows and linux even if linux is read only?? I have 250gb external NTFS drive, which mounts fine read only under 2005LE. I mount it manually though. You can try this... unmount the external drive and other Win partitions, then mount the external drive again using the CLI command mount. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted March 13, 2006 Report Share Posted March 13, 2006 FAT32 does not have theoretically a size limit (leave aside the 4G one), but it gets horribly fragmented in I/O operations, and large partition sizes ( 30G or bigger) end up to loads of HD space being wasted as slack. Plus, that there's complete lack of any kind of recovery journal... So, very large FAT32 partitions are no cure, either. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oldnoob Posted March 13, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 13, 2006 I only want to be able to put music files on it and then read them again, will this cause fragmentation problems? I got a large drive to store as much as I can, I dont want to loose it to wasted space As for the recovery, well everything is backed up anyway Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michaelcole Posted March 13, 2006 Report Share Posted March 13, 2006 fragmentation... From what i understand is caused when you start with many small files and they grow in size so the hardisk space needed is further down the disk to expand the file thus becomes a fragment.. From what i understand you want to copy all the files and they will not grow so should not be a problem.. Regards.. If I'm wrong please correct me.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted March 13, 2006 Report Share Posted March 13, 2006 As a rule of a thumb, don't use FAT32 partitions bigger than 30G... if necessary, create multiple FAT32 partitions smaller than 30G. And fragmentation is unavoidable, as FAT32 does not use "smart file placement" as NTFS, ext3 and ReiserFS do. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oldnoob Posted March 13, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 13, 2006 Thank you all for your comments, you have all been very helpful. I am still a bit unsure as to what I will do, but I guess Ill try the fat32 option as well as experiment with a newer version of mandriva. My aim is to have an external that my family can just switch on and use and that can be shared with friends who are windows users. Maybe the windows users could learn to read ext3! That would be nice. I guess there is no easy answer yet. Thanks again all for your help Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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