Re: Getting Linux to recognize Windows files.

[David Stern <dstern@u.washington.edu>]

On Mon, 23 Nov 1998 09:36:56 PST, Bret Craw wrote:
> How do I get Linux to recognize the Windows files, so that I can use them.
> I have free internet access in Win98, that I can't configure for Linux.  I
> pull down my files to the Windows partition.  I have set up Linux to
> recognize the MSDOS partition, so that I can see what is on the hard drive.
> How do I get the files over into Linux and is there a way to get it to
> recognize the long filenames, without concatinating them?  I have tried to
> do it with TKdesk, but it keeps telling me that the directory is not
> correct, even though I am looking at the file in the window.  I have tried
> to copy the file, extracting the file to Linux, but nothing seems to work.
> Is there a program that may make it easier?  Also, I am extremely new to
> Linux, and am more comfortable in XWindows.
> 
> Bret Craw
> Maintenance Renewal

Presumably you're mounting the win partitions as type dos or msdos?  
Try using vfat, it works for my winNT partition, and it used to work 
for my old win95 partition.  I'm not sure about win98.  Also, your 
kernel will have to support these fs types, so if it doesn't work, 
reconfigure and recompile your kernel. For a listing of fs types man 
mount.

The win files will be owned by root, so you won't be able to write to 
them as a regular user.  Although I'm sure there are ways to directly 
edit your win files as user, I prefer to need to become root so that I 
don't accidentally overwrite the original win file, and instead just 
edit local copies as user, then become root to copy them back.  You 
should be able to copy from dos to local partition as a regular user, 
then as root chown the files to user.user if you want to save changes 
to them as user.

$ su
Password:
# mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos
# exit
$ cp /mnt/dos/winfile.txt .   <--- Note "." means "to right here"
$ su
Password:
# chown dstern.dstern file.txt
# exit
$ edit file.txt
$ su
Password:
# cp file.txt /mnt/dos/winnt/profiles/dstern/personal/
# exit

HTH,
-- 
David
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                                               dstern@u.washington.edu