I want to read my windows Drive from within Linux?
I have written this HOW TO for Windows users new to Linux. It is only meant to give a very basic insight as to the way Linux handles hardware devices and filing systems.
For the sake of simplisaty, I am making some assumptions; Namely you started with a ôwindows machineö with one hard drive fitted .
You freed up some space and created two new partitions for linux to reside, using tools like fips & fdisk
NOTE: LINUX MOUNTS FILING SYSTEMS NOT DEVICES
BASIC Linux Hardware devices
fd =floppy drives
hd =harddrives
cdrom =CD-Rom
All Linux Device's are stored in a directory called /dev so more properly /dev/hd
We are only concerned with /dev/hd here. Linux will allocate a letter for each physical hard drive attached to your system starting with a
so if you have only one hard drive on your system it would be labeled /dev/hda
this is regardless of how many partitions their are on that hard drive
Partitions
As you know, when you installed Linux on to your system you had to create two new partitions on your hard drive for Linux to reside.
The ROOT partition and the SWAP partition.
So including the Windows partition, you now have three partitions on your hard drive.
Linux will allocate a number to each partition on /dev/hda
/dev/hda1 Windows FAT
/dev/hda2 Linux Root ect3
/dev/hda3 Linux Swap
So /dev/hda1 is the Windows filing system
on hard drive /dev/hda
It is this Filing system that can be MOUTED by Liunx
You can use the command line to mount /dev/hda1 if you wish.
But for me, that is way too much messing about every time I want to get photo or document from my windows drive. So tell Linux to mount it at boot.
Log on to Linux as root.
Firstly you need a place for linux to mount the files stored on /dev/hda1
Open the directory /mnt and create a new directory there, and name it windows
So /mnt/windows will be the place to look for your windows files
Now, tell Linux to mount the filing system at boot. This is done by a configuration file called /ect/fstab. Using a text editor open the file.