Open a command-line terminal.

See Chapter 6 if you’re not sure how to do so.

Type su - and press Enter to become the root (administrative) user.

You are asked to enter the root password. Do so when prompted and press Enter.

Type fdisk -l to see all your hard drives and partitions.

If you’re looking for a Windows partition, you can find it right here. Ignore the items that have text similar to Windows 95 Ext’d; they’re not really a data partition. Anything that has NTFS or FAT32 or VFAT is a Windows partition and is what you’re interested in. If you’re looking for a Linux partition (maybe you have more than one distribution installed on your system), you want the ones that have the word Linux in their description and not the word swap.

If you need to access an NTFS partition, see Chapter 16 for how to add NTFS support to Fedora.

The packages you want all start with ntfs. There’s a collection of them: Go ahead and install them all, or at least ntfs-3g, ntfs-config, and ntfsprogs.

When you think you know what partition you want to try, type mount -t type /dev/partition /mnt to add it to your filesystem, where type is the filesystem type (vfat or ntfs), as shown in Table 8-1, and partition is the letter and number combination you saw in fdisk (such as hde2).

Table 8-1. Common Filesystem Types

Type	Description
ext2	“Older” Linux filesystem type
ext3	“Newer” Linux filesystem type, used by default in Fedora and Red Hat, among others
ntfs	“Newer” Windows filesystem type, started with Windows NT and commonly used in Windows XP and Vista
reiserfs	Another “newer” Linux filesystem type, used by default in Mandrake and SuSE, among others
vfat	“Older” Windows filesystem type, such as FAT32 and MS-DOS

So, for example, after adding NTFS support, you might type mount -t ntfs /dev/hde2 /mnt. When you do so, you can find all of that partition’s contents under the /mnt directory.

Browse as you need to.

You may find that you have read-only access to your NTFS partition and can’t change anything on it.

If you want to be able to write to the NTFS drive, go to ApplicationsSystemNTFS Configuration Tool, enter your root password if necessary, click the Enable Write Support for Internal (if the drive is in your computer) or External (if the drive is connected from outside) Device check box, and click OK.

When you’re finished with the drive, type umount /mnt to remove the partition’s contents from your filesystem.