Access my password protected windows partition in Arch

playdafunkimuzic · 2009-06-21 20:04:03

My windows partition, is on say: /dev/sda2. It is password protected, but it is mine (I know the password...) Can I mount it somehow?

graysky · 2009-06-21 21:33:13

You gotta be more specific here... is it FAT or NTFS? When you say it's password protected, do you mean that it's an encrypted partition, or that when you're in Windows, only a specific user can access it? If the latter is true, NTFS security descriptors are meaningless under Linux. As long as your Linux user has rights to use mount, he can access the data.

Let's assume you've got an NTFS partition since you mentioned that it's password protected. Make sure you have ntfs-3g:

# pacman -Sy ntfs-3g

Now you can add a line to your /etc/fstab if you want (for example /dev/sda2 /media/windows ntfs-3g defaults,noatime 0 0), or just manually mount/umount the partition at will.

# mkdir /media/windows
# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 /media/windows

That will mount it w/ 777 for all users.

Last edited by graysky (2009-06-21 21:35:12)

playdafunkimuzic · 2009-06-21 23:18:30

Wow, that's really depressing...how can I encrypt it..for real?

graysky · 2009-06-22 00:26:20

Encryption is the only answer since even on an ext3/4 partition with Linux permissions, anyone with physical access to your machine can boot a live CD with root and access the data.

You want to encrypt the entire partition and have both Linux and Windows still work? I don't think that's possible. You can keep a data partition (not a windows root partition) encrypted via truecrypt that both Linux and Windows can use. The downside to that is that you'll need to keep good backups because you're more or less encrypting a large single file (container) that true crypt will mount as if it were a drive partition. Backups are important because if several blocks of the hdd that contain the truecrypt volume go bad the entire archive is bad since I believe there is no fault tolerance.

Last edited by graysky (2009-06-22 00:27:26)

Arch Linux

#1 2009-06-21 20:04:03

Access my password protected windows partition in Arch

#2 2009-06-21 21:33:13

Re: Access my password protected windows partition in Arch

#3 2009-06-21 23:18:30

Re: Access my password protected windows partition in Arch

#4 2009-06-22 00:26:20

Re: Access my password protected windows partition in Arch

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