I have tried many ways of sharing files between an XP NTFS partition and FC3 and have a few questions that I need help with:
I have 3 primary partitions set up by Partition Magic - XP NTFS, shared VFAT, and FC3. Despite man documents claiming Linux fully supports NTFS I find that FC3 reports "kernel does not support NTFS" on a mount command. So questions 1&2:
1. Is there any way I can read/write my NTFS partition from FC3?
Read yes; writing is not very safe.
NTFS support is not included in Fedora Core for legal reasons. You can get the NTFS drivers as RPMs from:
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/index.html
See http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/rel26.html#limitations for details of write support.
2. If not, is a shared VFAT partition the best alternative?
This is the best way anyway.
Now to the real problem. At the moment I am mounting the VFAT partition with an entry in fstab: /dev/hda6 /mnt/win vfat defaults 0 0 Heeding the many warnings on this list about newbies running as root I tried to run as my user account accessing the shared partition (where all of my shared workfiles are) but have no permissions because both owner and group of all files is 'root'. I have tried chown, chgrp, (as root) and anything else I can think of but that does not work, I believe due to it being a VFAT drive mounted by root. I have tried all ways I can think of to mount as a user, all give me access and permission warnings. So the last question:
3. How do I mount the VFAT partition so that an ordinary user can read/write to it?
See http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs.html#4.5 and the next few entries in that section.
Paul.
