ServerBuddies Support Blog

How can I get access to a Windows file system

By default, Linux supports direct read/write access to FAT16 and FAT32 file system that Microsoft Windows uses, but not to an NTFS file system.

To access an NTFS file system on Linux.

Install a third party software named kernel-module-ntfs. We can get the rpm package from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-ntfs/files

The kernel-ntfs kernel module will be load automatically by default when server reboot next time. Then you can mount your ntfs file system manually. We can load the kernel module by modprobe and use lsmod to confirm it’s installed

Install a third party software named ntfs-3g and fuse.

Please access http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/ to get ntfs-3g and fuse.

NTFS-3G is a stable, read/write NTFS driver for Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, QNX, Haiku, and other operating systems. It provides safe handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 NTFS file systems.

After successfully install, you can run command such as:

Mount windows drive to linux filesystem

Step 1: Take a Linux system. Install samba in your Linux system and start the service.

Step 2: Create a directory in Linux to which you will be mounting the files. Usually a subdirectory in “/mnt”

Step 3: Goto windows system. Share the drive/folder in windows system which you want to mount to Linux. Make sure that the drive/folder you are going to share is having the share permission for administrator.

Step 4: Go back to Linux system. Type the following command,

Step 5: Go to the directory you have made in Linux for mounting. Now you can see all the contents in windows drive/folder in that directory.