How to create a folder on linux that contains my windows C drive

Question

If any of you have ever installed Ubuntu via the program Wubi, you'll have noticed an extra folder on your partition named "host".
When you open this folder, you get to see the contents of your Windows C:\> drive. You can then work with it, open files, copy files from it and to it and everything else you can do with every other folder on your partition.

When manually installing Ubuntu or any other Linux distro, this is not the case. So I'm wondering, how can I make this happen in any multi-boot environment?

Answer 1

This should do what you want.

Answer 2

Create the folder wherever you want it to be, and then mount the partition to that folder. Your Windows partition will be something like /dev/hda1, so run 'mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /windows-folder'. Once you've got it set up, add it to fstab so that it's automatically mounted on boot.

Answer 3

This is strange, the last time I installed Ubuntu as dual-boot, it automagically recognized the Windows drives (NTFS based btw) and I could mount them by just double clicking in the Places > Computer window.

Edit: ah well I might have done it manually. Here's the fstab entry I used:

/dev/sda2       /mnt/windows    ntfs-3g uid=1000,gid=1000,rw,noatime,force 0 0

"1000" being my user id number (third field in /etc/passwd)

I still think it was automagic, IIRC I only added that line to force ownership of the files to my user.