11.3 Accessing Files on Different OS on the Same Computer
New computers generally ship with a preinstalled operating system,
usually Windows. If you have installed Linux on a different
partition, you might want to exchange files between the
different operating systems.
Windows can not read Linux partitions. If you want to exchange files
between these two operating systems, you have to create an exchange
partition
. The following file systems are used by Windows and can be
accessed from a Linux machine:
- FAT
-
Various flavors of this file system are used by MS-DOS and Windows
95 and 98. You can create this type of file system with YaST. It is
possible to read and write files on FAT partitions from Linux. The size
of a FAT partition and even the maximum size of
a single file is subject to restrictions, depending on the FAT
version. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VFAT for more information
about FAT file systems.
- NTFS
-
The NTFS file system is used by Windows NT, Windows 2000,
Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista.
openSUSE includes write access support to the NTFS file system.
However, the driver for the NTFS-3g filesystem has limited
functionality. At the moment there is no
support for Windows file permissions and you can not access encoded or
compressed files. See https://en.opensuse.org/NTFS-3g for more information about
NTFS-3g.
During the installation of openSUSE, your Windows partitions are
detected. After starting your Linux system, the Windows partitions usually are
mounted.
These are possible ways of accessing your
Windows data:
- KDE
-
Press Alt+F2 and enter sysinfo:/. A new window opens
displaying the characteristics of your machine. lists your partitions. Look at those that are of the
file system type ntfs or
vfat and click on these
entries. If the partition is not already mounted, KDE mounts the
partition now and displays the contents.
- Command Line
-
Just list the contents of /win to see one or
more directories containing your Windows drives. The directory
/win/c maps to the Windows
drive C:\, for example.
NOTE: Changing the Accessibility of Windows Partitions
Initially Windows partitions are mounted read-only for normal users to avoid
accidental damage to the file system. To grant normal users full access to a
mounted Windows partition, change the mount behavior of this Windows
partition. Refer to the manual page of the mount
command for more information.
