unable to get into the partiton

[REDDEVIL]

hello

ok so i have a 250 gig partition i made within Vista Prumium on my hard drive for al my music / films / files etc etc , when i have dual booted vista with Linux Mint or Ubuntu they can "see / read" the partiton IE i can get to my music / films and play them within Ubuntu / Linux , but i have found that when i have not had Vista installed and had Linux / ubuntu i'm unable to get into the partiton , is there any way to be able to use it with just Linux installed as im looking to dump Vista and use only Linux ?

thanx

[bobescalin2005]

Hi and welcome to the forum.

so you have a 250 GB just for stuff and what file system have the partition that you made? you can post the

fdisk -l

from your linux as root.

[Sunnyside]

Many Linux distributions give you the option to set up partitions manually during installation in the partitioning stage by clicking on "advanced" or "custom" or similar. This is where you would highlight the NTFS partition and create a mount point in the Linux file system.
I have a similar situation, when I recently installed Mandriva 2009 I highlighted my NTFS data partition and set the mount point to "/data". After installation was completed, I could read/write to it from that directory as Mandriva also installed ntfs-3g which allows read/write access to NTFS partitions. Not sure if Ubuntu will install ntfs-3g, it can be installed after reboot if needed. I imagine you should be able to do the same as Mandriva and make a mount point for the NTFS partition during partitioning stage.
If you can't, or can't figure out how during installation, you can do it after reboot by running command: fdisk -l to find which device it is, then create a mount point, then mount it manually or edit the /etc/fstab file to have it mounted automatically at every boot. This is a little more complicated than doing it during installation, but not so tough with forum help.

Example:
If you determined the NTFS partition to be /dev/sda3 from the fdisk -l command, make a directory in the Linux file system, mount it manually with these two commands:

mkdir /data
mount -t ntfs /dev/sda3 /data

If you decided to install ntfs-3g first to allow read/write access, use these two command:

mkdir /data
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda3 /data

To have it mounted upon every bootup, edit the /etc/fstab file as sudo or root and add this line:

/dev/sda3      /data     ntfs    defaults     0     0

Or with ntfs-3g installed:

/dev/sda3      /data     ntfs-3g    defaults     0     0

Many distributions require you to hit the "Tab" key in between those entries, for example, type: /dev/sda3, then hit the Tab key, then type in: /data, then the Tab key again before: ntfs, etc.
You can make your mount point whatever you want to call it, I use /data as an example.

[jmadero]

A few things:

1. I wouldn't dump vista just yet, give Linux 6 months, try out a few distros, dual boot for the time being, does no harm being there for a few more months. I dual booted for about 2 years before switching completely over.

2. IF you are determined to get rid of Vista, then get rid of that drive comletely. In Linux you can install gparted, shrink down that partition as much as possible, move your stuff over to your linux partition (or another partition - with that size HD I would definitely say have your home folder separate from your root). Move your stuff over, if it doesn't all fit right away, do it a few times, slowly move stuff over.

3. If you are still determined to keep the NTFS partition (oh yeah forgot to mention, if you decide to do 2 make your partitions all ext3 or ext4), most major distros have native support for NTFS so all that stuff about ntfs-3g isn't necessary any more. It's more just permissions. So for that:

post your /etc/fstab file

(terminal, sudo gedit /etc/fstab)

Sunnyside's information is good but I think it was a bit more than you need, if you just post we can give you the exact line that you need to change and if you want more of an explanation we can do that

Good luck with the switch, I've never regretted ditching MS, I think most people who use Linux feel the same way