error accessing NTFS partition

[NoOp]

On 03/29/2008 08:09 AM, Wade Smart wrote:
> NoOp wrote:
>> There is nothing there to indicate that there is an ntfs drive or
>> partition.
>> 
>> This is what an ntfs entry would look like:
>> 
>> # /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb1  /media/windows  ntfs
>> iocharset=utf8,umask=000    0  0 /dev/sdb2  /media/sdb2     ntfs
>> defaults                   0  0
>> 
>> Perhaps the easiest for him would be to install a gui to modify the
>> fstab:
>> 
>> sudo apt-get install pysdm
>> 
>> Then System|Administration|Storeage Device Manager
>> 
>> Then click on the arrow at sda or sdb whichever is the ntfs drive
>> and follow the defaults. Afterwards you should be able to use a
>> terminal to:
>> 
>> sudo mount -a
>> 
>> and see the drive(s) appear on the desktop.
>> 
>> It would also be helpful if you can get him to provide the output
>> (from the terminal) of:
>> 
>> sudo fdisk -l
>> 
>> 
> 
> 03292008 1001 GMT-6
> 
> Thanks for that info NoOp. I passed it along and he is doing that
> now.
> 
> Secondary question: Im thinking that because this situation is such a
> unstable one, is there a good file compression software to compress
> his 200gb of backed up data and move it off the ntfs partition and
> then he can reformat to a linux partition and then uncompress his
> data. Just looking through synaptic there are a lot of them.

You can unzip tar.gz files in windows. 7-zip does a rather good job on
both sides (gz and zip):

http://www.7-zip.org/

However, with that much data you'd have to break it into chunks, and it
might be worth just buying another drive for backup.

> 
> He just posted to me that he tried putting the drive in an external
> unit and access it with his laptop (unfortunately Vista) and that
> didnt work. I told him to find a XP Pro computer and try again.

Are we now talking about the USB drive ("He also said that he has a
external drive that is usb and it is also ntfs and that he can access
it.") or the original drive with:

> It was originally a duel boot machine with three partitions.
> 1 was ntfs for windows
> 1 was ntfs data for windows
> 1 was for ubuntu.

What was the output of:

sudo fdisk -l

??