[QCLUG] I broke it

[Mark Riedesel]

On Feb 17, 2008 7:26 AM, Robert Jones <robert@rm-jones.com> wrote:
>
>  I Broke My Kubuntu :-( .  Yep, Windows XP (spit spit) is back in my
> computer.  But like Arnold says "I'll be back".  Next time I'll do a dual
> boot on my HP box.  He (R2-D2) has a split personality anyhow so he won't
> mind sharing with a penguin :-) .
>
>  I don't know what I did.  Everything was going great except for one
> persistent problem that kept after me.  It seems that Ubuntu doesn't like
> external USB drives that are formatted in NTFS.  The new one (750 GB) that I
> bought gave me all kinds of problems.  And, I think in the end Ubuntu ATE it
> as when I tried to use it on Windows XP (spit spit) I couldn't get some of
> the files to delete and I couldn't format it either.  Sooooo Best Buy got it
> back.  From what research I did I found that Linux isn't able to change the
> Owner or Preferences on FAT32 or NTFS drives.

Right, you can't chmod/chown anything on NTFS because it uses a very
different permissions system and FAT32 has none at all, but you can
tell Linux to mount the drive as a user other than root which should
give you full read/write access to the contents of the drive. I assume
that's what you included in your /etc/fstab

I would put the correct
> settings in /etc/fstab and it would work great, until I restarted the
> computer then it wouldn't work.  The problem is that each time (well, maybe
> not every time) that the computer starts it would assign a different ID to
> the drive.

Did you use the partition's UUID in the fstab entry? The UUID
shouldn't change between reboots regardless of filesystem type.
It would have looked something like this:

UUID=FC2C5B962C5B4AB2 /media/mobile_storage ntfs-3g
defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 1

If you used the device node, then yes, it'll most likely become a moving target.

>  One time it would be called one thing and next time something
> else so Ubuntu couldn't find it from the fstab settings.  I guess the way
> around that would be to format it to ext3 but I wanted to use the data on my
> remaining Windows (spit spit) machine until I got fully converted to
> Kubuntu.  Oh well, the long and the short of it is I took Linux back out
> (for now) and my wife is now convinced (as if she wasn't before) that I am
> totally MAD.  You should see my beautiful and usually charming wife shake
> her head when she walks by my computer room and sees Windows (spit spit)
> disk everywhere.  It is actually funny.
>
>  Another curious thing that happened, probably because I wasn't doing my
> backups, using Simple Backup, correctly.  My 160GB drive that Kubuntu was on
> was 96% full and I had very few data files on it.

du -hs /   to show which directories contain all that space, or use a
friendly graphical drive space tool like filelight.

Even Vista (spit spit)
> doesn't use that much space so I must have been doing something wrong.  Who
> would have guessed that I could do something wrong :-) .

So far, installing XP was the only thing I've seen that you've done
wrong so far, that and maybe returning that drive ;-)

>
>  If anyone know how to get an external FAT32 or NTFS USB drive to work,
> please let me know.  I will probably start putting Kubuntu / Ubuntu back in
> before to long.  I may wait for the next version to get out in about April.
> Don't know yet.  In the mean time I'll be here.
>  Thanks for the help
>  Bob Jones
>

Now, back on the horse! :-)

Mark