Ubuntu

Mounting a Windows XP partition for writing to.

Asked by Gabriel

Hi

I've just installed UBUNTU on a partition of my hard disk and all appears to have gone well. My problem is that my Windows XP partition is mounted as read only and I can only access it using sudo. I've tried changing the permissions of /media/sda2 using "sudo chmod" and I also changed the options field in /etc/fstab to "rw", but neither works. I expect to be able to write to the Windows partition and for all users to have similar access. What am I missing?

tx

g

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Solved
For:
Ubuntu Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Solved by:
Dave Meikle
Solved:
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Dave Meikle (dmk-uk) said : 		#1

Hi there,

I am assuming you XP box uses NTFS, if not you should be able to write already:

Writing to NTFS filesystems is not supported by default on the kernels shiped with Ubuntu. To write to NTFS you would have recompile your Kernel to enable the NTFS writing. The parameter is CONFIG_NTFS_RW. There is also Captive-NTFS but I would not recomend this approach.

Please note that writing to NTFS is disabled as many consider this still to be dangerous, although the version of the NTFS code in the kernel is safe but limited to only overwriting existing files IIRC.

If you really need to write files between Windows and Linux it is best to use the FAT32 filesystem.

Regards,
Dave

Revision history for this message
Dave Meikle (dmk-uk) said : 		#2

NOTE: When I say "safe" I mean it says it "safe" I have never used it ;-)

Revision history for this message
Gabriel (matthewg) said : 		#3

Thanks a million, Dave.