[SOLVED] I thought root could do anything :)

[OldGrantonian]

I have dual-boot XP/Karmic

I have an external HDD for backup. One partition is NTFS for the XP stuff. The second partition is ext4.

I was practicing with the SystemRestoreCD, which provides a Linux root console.

I can create and delete directories on the ext4 partition, but not on the NTFS partition. The error message says "read-only file system".

The permissions on the NTFS partion are:

rwx --- --- myName myName

I tried to use chmod and chown to change permissions and owner.

I assumed that as root, I could do anything.

How can I access the NTFS partition, and do anything that I need to do?

BTW: All my current XP stuff on the HDD was backed up from within XP, using standard software (Cobian Backup), and normal user privileges. But I want to practice for when my XP OS is damaged.
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[coopstah13]

you have to mount ntfs partition with option umask=0 in order to be able to write to it

[OldGrantonian]

Thanks for the response

you have to mount ntfs partition with option umask=0 in order to be able to write to it

I tried:

mount -t ntfs -rw /dev/sdb1   /mnt/freecom

Notice that in all cases, if I type "mount", I always get the message:

... type ntfs (rw)

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[Jonathan183]

You should use the ntfs-3g driver for ntfs read/write. Unmount the partition and try using ntfs-3g instead.

[OldGrantonian]

Unmount the partition and try using ntfs-3g instead.

Thanks for the suggestion

How do I use it?
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[yancek]

Use Synaptic to check to see if ntfs-3g is installed. If it is, you just need to use the mount command:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/freecom

To make it permanent, put an entry in /etc/fstab

[devils casper]

Don't forget to add umask=0 to enable read/write access for all users.

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/partition  /mount_point  -o defaults,umask=0

[OldGrantonian]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Everything worked great

After gaining write access to the HDD, I used fsarchiver to back up the XP Windows partition.

I then tested the backup by deleting every file on the partition. (I've always wanted to try that )

The restore worked perfectly. (No GRUB problems.)

Thanks again.
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