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Viewing and Planning Partitions

If you are dual-booting Windows and Linux, you may wish to be able to access your Windows filesystem from Linux. For the most part, this is fairly trivial. Basically, it involves ensuring that kernel support is present for the filesystem type that you wish to be able to mount.

How Can I See My Windows Partitions From Linux?

If you are dual-booting Windows and Linux, you may wish to be able to access your Windows filesystem from Linux. For the most part, this is fairly trivial. Basically, it involves ensuring that kernel support is present for the filesystem type that you wish to be able to mount.

For example, to be able to mount a Windows filesystem, you may need to have any of NTFS, MSDOS, or VFAT support built into your system, depending on which version of Windows you have. If your system is running Windows 3.1, then MSDOS is probably what you’re after. If you are running Windows 9x or ME, go for VFAT. (VFAT is pretty much MSDOS with the capacity to support long filenames. In an emergency, you can mount a VFAT drive as though it were an MSDOS drive.) For Windows NT, XP, or 2000, use NTFS.

If all else fails, you can use fdisk to check. This is done, as root, by typing the following:

 # fdisk /dev/device 

where device represents the drive holding the partition you’re after. This would be hda for a primary IDE drive. Alternatively, if you mean the secondary IDE drive (on the primary controller), then it would be:

 # fdisk /dev/hdb 

or the primary IDE drive on the secondary controller:

 # fdisk /dev/hdc 

and so on. If you’re using SCSI,…

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