Mounting 129 gb NTFS partition

[snakedog]

Recently installed 8.04 on a Toshiba Satellite with a 160 gb HDD. I already had XP on the first partition (FAT, 13-14 gb's), some free space in the middle for Ubuntu, and then a 129 gb NTFS partition at the end.

The installer let me mount the first partition at /windows, but I got an error trying to set a mount point on the 129 gb NTFS partition. So I figured I could mount it manually after the install and/or set things up there. But it didn't even make it into the fstab or mtab files.

What can I do here to be able to mount, or better yet, automount that partition? The appropriate files are as follows:

----------------------------------

snakedog@ubuntu:~$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda4 9427328 2504868 6447340 28% /
varrun 509204 104 509100 1% /var/run
varlock 509204 0 509204 0% /var/lock
udev 509204 52 509152 1% /dev
devshm 509204 0 509204 0% /dev/shm
lrm 509204 39788 469416 8% /lib/modules/2.6.24-22-generic/volatile
/dev/sda1 14669032 5945080 8723952 41% /windows

---------------------------------

snakedog@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/sda
[sudo] password for karl:

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 19457.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x355b355a

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1828 14683378+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 3136 19457 131106465 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 3012 3135 996030 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4 1829 3011 9502447+ 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Command (m for help): q

-------------------------------------

If I try to manually mount it, I get this:

snakedog@ubuntu:~$ mount /dev/sda2
mount: can't find /dev/sda2 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab
snakedog@ubuntu:~$ sudo mount /dev/sda2
mount: can't find /dev/sda2 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

I've never edited fstab and/or mtab and am unsure how to proceed.

-----fstab----------------------------

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sda4
UUID=95594f48-4a59-4953-89ce-07a08f157dd5 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/sda1
UUID=9488-18C3 /windows vfat utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
# /dev/sda3
UUID=c454435b-f66f-4747-8364-501b10041291 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

-----mtab------------------

/dev/sda4 / ext3 rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 0
proc /proc proc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
/sys /sys sysfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
varrun /var/run tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,mode=0755 0 0
varlock /var/lock tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,mode=1777 0 0
udev /dev tmpfs rw,mode=0755 0 0
devshm /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
lrm /lib/modules/2.6.24-22-generic/volatile tmpfs rw 0 0
/dev/sda1 /windows vfat rw,utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 0
securityfs /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw 0 0

---------------------------

Thanks for any help.

[Mark Phelps]

That's because your mount command is incomplete.

The syntax of the mount command is mount -t <type> <device> <dir>

Since you're mounting an NTFS volume, you should use NTFS-3G to mount it. If that package is not installed, add it through synaptic first.

Then, create a mount point using "sudo mkdir /mnt/windows" where "windows" is the name of the directory you want to contain the files.

Then, issue the following mount command "sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 /mnt/windows"

The format for fstab entries is different than the mount command.