Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [483]
While Linux is running, you can mount a Windows partition like any other type of partition. For example, if the third partition on your first IDE hard disk contains your Windows 98 installation, you can make the files in it accessible with the following command, which must be executed as root:
# mount -t vfat /dev/hda3 /mnt/windows98
The /dev/hda3 argument specifies the disk drive corresponding to the Windows 98 disk, and the /mnt/windows98 argument can be changed to any directory you've created for the purpose of accessing the files. But how do you know that you need (in this case) /dev/hda3? If you're familiar with the naming conventions for Linux filesystems, you'll know that hda3 is the third partition on the hard disk that is the master on the primary IDE port. You'll find life easier if you write down the partitions while you are creating them with fdisk, but if you neglected to do that, you can run fdisk again to view the partition table.
The filesystem drivers support a number of options that can be specified with the -o option of the mount command. The mount(8) manual page documents the options that can be used, with sections that explain options specific to the fat and ntfs filesystem types. The section for fat applies to both the msdos and vfat filesystems, and there are two options listed there that are of special interest.
The check option determines whether the kernel should accept filenames that are not permissible on MS-DOS and what it should do with them. This applies only to creating and renaming files. You can specify three values for check. relaxed lets you do just about everything with the filename. If it doesn't fit into the 8.3 convention of MS-DOS files, the filename will be truncated accordingly. normal, the default, will also truncate the filenames as needed, and also removes special characters such as * and ? that are not allowed in MS-DOS filenames. Finally, strict forbids both long filenames and the special characters. To make Linux more restrictive with respect to filenames on the partition mounted in our example, the mount command could be used as follows:
# mount -o check=strict -t msdos /dev/sda5 /mnt/dos
This option is used with msdos filesystems only; the restrictions on filename length do not apply to vfat filesystems.
The conv option can be useful, but not as commonly as you might at first think. Windows and Unix systems have different conventions for how a line ending is marked in text files. Windows uses both a carriage return and a linefeed character, whereas Unix only uses a linefeed. Although this does not make the files completely illegible on the other system, it can still be a bother. To tell the kernel to perform the conversion between Windows and Unix text-file styles automatically, pass the mount command the option conv, which has three possible values: binary, the default, does not perform any conversion; text converts every file; and auto tries to guess whether the file in question is a text file or a binary file. auto does this by looking at the filename extension. If this extension is included in the list of "known binary extensions," it is not converted; otherwise, it will be converted.
It is not generally advisable to use text, because this will invariably damage any binary files , including graphics files and files written by word processors, spreadsheets, and other programs. Likewise, auto can be dangerous, because the extension-based detection mechanism is not very sophisticated. So we suggest you don't use the conv option unless