Accessing NTFS and Sharing Mozilla Profiles

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1

Newb here for starters…just wanted to get that out of the way to avoid any awkward confrontations later. I just installed suse on my notebook to replace another distro and am having a few issues.

The first is accessing my Windows XP partition. Right now I have done nothing but failed miserably in my attempts, resulting in two folders (one in the /media folder and another in the root (/) folder). If anyone could help me get rid of those, that would be great. They came about after failed attempts to edit the fstab.

Also, once this issue is resolved, I would like to have my opensuse firefox use the windows firefox profile on the ntfs drive. I’ve tried numerous times to get this done on ubuntu and have never managed to get it to work.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Max

2

For mounting the xp drive do you know what device it is (ie sda1 sda2) ?

Not sure how to share firefox but can help you set up Thunderbird sharing if you need it.

3

I am currently using Windows so I’m not sure how to go about checking, but I believe it is /dev/sda1

4

make a directory to mount to I use /windows/label as mount points myself but it’s up to you.

Now add the following to your fstab:

Root only write:

/dev/sda1 /directory/you/made ntfs-3g 0 0

Users can write:

/dev/sda1 /directory/you/made ntfs-3g
noauto,user,users,gid=users,fmask=113,dmask=002 0 0

Note it’s all on a single line.

5

I changed a few things around by deleting my hp recovery partition and replacing it with 45 gigs or so that i plan to share between both linux and windows. I formatted it as ntfs.

So i assume once I boot back into suse I’ll be able to run the fdisk -l or whatever it is to see where that partition is (i assume it’ll be sda3) and then just replace that in the directions given above?

Any ideas for deleting folders from root since i’m ocd enough to despise the windows mce and windows folders i ahve in the “/” and “/media” folders.

6

Yes: fdisk -l
will give the partition info

You will need to add a line to /etc/fstab

eg:

/dev/sda3 /path_to/mount_point ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

remember the /path_to/mount_point above needs to be changed to where you want it mounted.
You could create a folder in your tree called /XP_Lin_Share

so the above would look like this

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

To be honest I have always found the profiles in windows differ from Linux. In Linux it’s just .mozilla
If you try drilling down the windows dir you’ll see

7

Still have issues…:frowning:

Here’s what I’ve got right now (sorry for the formatting, if anyone can explain how to show it more clearly, that would be great)…

linux-0qeq:/ # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x282d282d

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 6529 52436160 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 6530 11619 40885425 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 13115 13244 1044225 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4 * 11620 12660 8353800 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

My /etc/fstab file looks like this…

/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST9120822AS_5LZ82KDQ-part3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST9120822AS_5LZ82KDQ-part4 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/sda2 /media/data ntfs-3g noauto,user,users,gid=users,fmask=113,dmask=002 0 0

Additionally, there is a fstab~ and fstab.save files in the root directory (not certain if that affects anything).

I do have a /media/data folder created as well. I created the folder while logged in as root. Would that affect any permissions?

8

Is the RED area the one in question?
edit it to this
/dev/sda2 /media/data ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

fstab~ = a backup of your file from the last time it was changed (it should look green) This is NOT the one you edit!

To change permissions open a terminal as su do

chmod

for eg: if you were talking about your folder ‘data’ in /media - to change permissions to have full access by all

chmod 777 /media/data
(I think that’s right)

[edit]
make sure there is an empty last line in fstab

9

ALL SET! Made the changes back to default and everything works great!

I did read somewhere that this could open up some issues if windows is not properly shut down (something about a force command being used to avoid a check disk in windows). Oh well, don’t bother the gift horse too much

10

Thats good to know that the latest version of ntfs-3g only needs the defaults attribute. Time for SuSe to maybe change this NTFS - openSUSE so that there’s a proper 11.1 section.