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It's no problem

Linux can read MicrosoftWindows Partitions just fine, you just need to Mount them onto the FileSystem.

You might not need to do anything

Most likely, your Windows partiton was probably configured for access when you installed Linux – try looking in the /mnt/ directory using your FileManager and see if there is a directory called windows or similar. If so, then simply clicking on it should show the contents of your C drive. If it looks empty, try issuing mount /mnt/windows on a root Shell.

If that doesn't help either, you need to configure a few things.

So it wasn't automatically set up?

First, you will have to make a "mount point", that is, a directory which the Partition will be mounted onto. Do this as root: mkdir /mnt/windows

Next, you need two pieces of information:

  1. The device name for the Windows Partition. This is usually /dev/hda1, but if you have multiple Windows partitions, multiple HardDisks or an otherwise out-of-the-ordinary setup, it may be something else. We'll assume /dev/hda1 here, but if yours is different, then substitute it accordingly.
  2. MicrosoftWindows Partitions come in two flavours: FAT, a crummy old format, and NTFS, a more modern format. You need to know which one you have. Windows 9x/ME can only work with FAT partitions, but Windows 2000 and XP can do both – they default to NTFS, though, so that's probably what you have.

To mount an NTFS partition, you use mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows; to mount a FAT partition, you use mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows.

Making it permanent

You successfully mounted your Windows partition? Great. But you'll have to issue the mount(8) command again the next time you boot the machine. If you want it mounted automatically, you can translate the command to a line in your /etc/fstab configuration like this:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat auto

You may be required to specify the user ID (UID) in /etc/fstab to get it to work with a non-root user:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat auto,uid=502

The "user" option allows the user to Mount and unmount, the "uid" option says which user can access files on that FileSystem. To get the UID for user joebob, issue id -u joebob.

NTFS in FedoraCore

FedoraCore doesn't have NTFS drivers built into the kernel, so you can't read Windows 2000/XP drives with it. You can however install pre-compiled NTFS kernel RPMS for Fedora to make it work.

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