New computers generally ship with a preinstalled operating system, usually Windows. If you have installed Linux on a different partition, you might want to exchange files between the different operating systems.
Windows can not read Linux partitions per default. If you want to exchange files between these two operating systems, you have to create an “exchange partition”. If you prefer a more directly approach look at http://www.fs-driver.org/ to get a driver supporting an ext2 filesystem on Windows. The following file systems are used by Windows and can be accessed from a Linux machine:
Various flavors of this file system are used by MS-DOS and Windows 95 and 98. You can create this type of file system with YaST. It is possible to read and write files on FAT partitions from Linux. The size of a FAT partition and even the maximum size of a single file is subject to restrictions, depending on the FAT version. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VFAT for more information about FAT file systems.
The NTFS file system is used by Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista. openSUSE includes write access support to the NTFS file system. However, the driver for the NTFS-3g filesystem has limited functionality. At the moment there is no support for Windows file permissions and you can not access encoded or compressed files. See http://en.opensuse.org/NTFS-3g for more information about NTFS-3g.
During the installation of openSUSE, your Windows partitions are detected. After starting your Linux system, the Windows partitions usually are mounted. These are possible ways of accessing your Windows data:
Press Alt+F2 and enter sysinfo:/
. A new window opens
displaying the characteristics of your machine. lists your partitions. Look at those that are of the
file system type ntfs
or
vfat
and click on these
entries. If the partition is not already mounted, KDE mounts the
partition now and displays the contents.
Just list the contents of /windows
to see one or
more directories containing your Windows drives. The directory
/windows/c
maps to the Windows
drive C:\
, for example.
![]() | Changing the Accessibility of Windows Partitions |
---|---|
Initially Windows partitions are mounted read-only for normal users to avoid
accidental damage to the file system. To grant normal users full access to a
mounted Windows partition, change the mount behavior of this Windows
partition. Refer to the manual page of the mount
command for more information on mount options for vfat and to the maual
page of |