Reading Microsoft Local Files
A word about Unix file systems
In Unix, you don't have drive letters. From a hardware standpoint, you have device names -- hda for the first IDE drive, hdb for the second, and so forth. The partitions have numbers -- hda1 for the first, and so on. Unix has the capacity to have four primary partitions and multiple extended partitions off the FIRST primary partition. Microsoft operating systems (except for OS/2 which they had an early hand in codeveloping) usually cannot use anything except the FIRST primary partition and extended partitions off of it. Under the Unix file system, the primary partitions are numbered 1 to 4 and the logical drives in the extended partition START with the number 5, even if the 3rd and 4th primary partitions do not exist. For that reason, typical installations of Linux use hda1, hda5, hda6 and so on. If an extended partition is used, the next available primary partition (typically the second) is used for that purpose, and is not available for a primary partition also. You can have either 1 to 4 primary partitions, or 1 to 3 primary partitions plus an extended that can have an unlimited number of logical partitions within that extended partition.
To read Microsoft files on the local computer, edit your /etc/fstab file so that the file system is mounted at boot up.
  • for FAT16 and FAT32 the line should read (for example)
    /dev/hda1 /dos /vfat defaults 0 0
    where hda1 is the partition and /dos is the mount point (it doesn't matter whether the partition being mounted is FAT16 or FAT 32)
  • for NTFS (WinNT or 2000) the line should read (for example)
    /dev/hda5 /nt /ntfs defaults 0 2
    where hda5 is the partition and /nt is the mount point (note: not all kernels are capable of mounting NTFS partitions, but Redhat 6.0 and 6.1 are, as well as Corel Linux and Caldera Open Linux 2.4). The access is READ ONLY, out of respect for Microsoft security. The protected operating system files in Windows-2000 are NOT readable.
    • To do the reverse (see Linux partitions from Microsoft) is in the experimental stage. Do a web search for the program 'explore2fs' and download the program. It will reveal ext2 (linux) partitions to Windows (read-only access). This can be useful for data recovery operations.