New hard drive will not mount [solved]

[Sunwatcher]

I dual-boot Mandriva and Vista. My vista partition is rather small, so I got another sata hard drive to use for data. Everything works well under vista. Here's my problem though: I'd like to use the drive as a "common drive" for vista and Mandriva, but Mandriva will not mount the drive. I have ntfs-3g installed. Under local disks in MCC, I can see the drive listed as "sdb", a mount point is listed "/media/hd2", and under type is "vfat" (vista formated it as ntfs). When I hit "mount" I get the following error: "mounting partition /dev/sdb1 in directory /media/hd2 failed."

 

What am I doing wrong?

[Ixthusdan]

The drive should be detected as ntfs, not vfat. This is why it will not mount.

[scarecrow]

cat /etc/fstab

[Sunwatcher]

cat /etc/fstab

 

How do I get Mandriva to detect as ntfs? (Under Vista the drive is shown as ntfs.)

 

"cat /etc/fstab" gives:

 

/dev/sda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1

/dev/sda7 /home ext3 defaults 1 2

none /proc proc defaults 0 0

/dev/sda6 swap swap defaults 0 0

/dev/sda1 /media/hd ntfs umask=0022,nls=utf8,sync,ro 0 0

/dev/sdb1 /media/hd2 vfat umask=0022,users,iocharset=utf8,sync,noauto,exec 0 0

/dev/sr0 /media/cdrom auto umask=0022,users,iocharset=utf8,sync,noauto,ro,exec 0 0

/dev/sdb5 /media/hd3 ntfs umask=0022,nls=utf8,sync,ro 0 0

[joste]

The line that says vfat should hae ntfs instead as for the other options I would assume they would be similar to the other lines containing ntfs but you would want to leave out the ro option as this would make it read only. Not having any windows partitions myself I'm afraid I can't be more accurate.

[Sunwatcher]

Thanks Joste. Can I just go in with gedit and change fstab? Does leaving out the ro option mean just deleting it? Should something replace it?

[scarecrow]

The "ro" option will not change much for Mandriva 2008.0 or older, as the "ntfs" driver had very limited writing abilities.

This does not apply for the current ntfs driver, which is full read/write, or the ntfs-3g fuse module (I surely enough prefer the latter- using it for almost a copule of years for reading and writing to ntfs partitions, and I NEVER had any issues with it).

If you change that entry to ntfs from vfat, change "iocharset" to "nls" as well. For a full list of mount switches supported per filesystem, consult "man mount".

And- you can use ANY texteditor you are familiar with, but always in root mode. I usually press F4 during a Midnight Commander session, but any editor, console or graphical, will do.

Edited March 2, 2008 by scarecrow

[Sunwatcher]

Thanks Scarecrow. I changed fstab and am now able to mount the drive through MCC. I can read from it, but I cannot write to it. I suspect that the drive's permissions are preventing me from writing. Unfortunately, I don't know how to change the permissions on a drive.

 

Currently permissions are given as "dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 16384 2008-03-02 10:07 hd2/". How do I change this?

[scarecrow]

If you want to write to an NTFS partition, you either have to use a very fresh kernel with the new NTFS module, or (easier and better) ntfs-3g

urpmi fuse ntfs-3g

My fstab entries for two non-removable ntfs volumes are very simple:

/dev/sdb1 /media/winxp ntfs-3g defaults 0 1
/dev/sdb2 /media/xpdata ntfs-3g defaults 0 1

As you see, I have used the ntfs-3g driver, and no arguments about the codepeage/name encoding. The reason is that I want to use the same encoding for my removable ntfs volumes as well (else some files named with Greek locales remain invisible). To achieve that, I have replaced /sbin/mount.ntfs-3g (which is just a symlink to /bin/ntfs-3g) with a simplistic script:

#!/bin/bash
/bin/ntfs-3g $1 $2 -o locale=el_GR.UTF-8

(of course one can replace "el_GR.UTF-8" with whatever locale his system is set at).

This way both the non-removable and the removable ntfs volumes display the local charset names.

Edited March 3, 2008 by scarecrow

[Sunwatcher]

Success! I modified the fstab entry for the new hd, rebooted, and the drive was automatically mounted with both read and write capabilities. Thanks again Scarecrow.