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 per default. If you want to
exchange files between these two operating systems, you have to create an
exchange partition
. If you prefer a more directly approach
look at https://www.fs-driver.org/ to get a driver
supporting an ext2 filesystem on Windows. 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 /windows to see one or
more directories containing your Windows drives. The directory
/windows/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 on mount options
for vfat and to the maual page of ntfs-3g on
mount options for NTFS.
