Newbie help!

[phill]

OK, firstly, I'd like to say Hi! I'm a new Linux convert. At least, I haven't completely stopped using Linux yet, for reasons which I'll explain in a moment, but I installed Linux Mandrake 8.1 a couple of weeks ago and I'm very happy with it  

Anyway. My current system configuration is Win2K on my primary HDD, and Mandrake on my secondary drive. Problem is, I've got a lot of data on my windows drive which I'd like to keep -- and it's rather tricky as the file system is NTFS.

Basically, is there anything which will let Linux access NTFS partitions? Backing up to CD isn't really a viable option as there's a hell of a lot of data on there...

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!
Phill

[lost]

Understand the dilema and this one can be tricky or easy depending on how much reading you want to do.

In the linux kernel there is an experimental NTFS read and write support option.  Compile the read only into your kernel.  if your now sure how goto www.linuxdoc.org and find the Kernel-HOWTO.  You have to enable the experimental support before you can see this option.  After this you are going to mount you windows drive to a directory on your system.

#mount -t ntfs /dev/hd[device name][partition number] /mnt

in your case it should look like:

#mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt

after which go into you /mnt directory and start copying things over to where you want them.  Read the docs on the kernel and this will be easy.  Don read them and you will be reinstalling linux because you had no idea of what the fuck just happened.  Mandrake should have installed the linux source in /usr/src/linux, run all the steps from the Kernel-HOWTO from there.

[phill]

Thanks Lost,

I'll check out the docs you mentioned and see how it goes    

Phill