Accessing hard disk

The MS-Windows NTFS is a trade secret file system. There are a couple of projects to reverse engineer it. The one in the stock Linux kernel lets you read files, and overwrite files with new ones exactly the same size. There's a new one claiming full read-write capability. If FC6 has that, they'd tell you in the release notes. If not, play it safe and mount the partition read-only.

Since I don't know which desktop environment you use, if any, we'll do it the old fashioned way.

Get a shell. Do that by opening your "terminal" of choice. I like xterm. You might like Konsole or GNOME Terminal or eterm. Or control-alt-F2 and use a console. (Probably alt-F7 gets you back to your X Window System.)

Take a look at your file /etc/fstab. (File system table.) Maybe FC6' installer made a line in there like

/dev/hda1 /mswindoze ntfs defaults,ro,user,noauto 0 0

/dev/hda1 is the first partition on the first Parallel ATA drive. If it's there and correct, type "mount /mswindoze" (into your shell) and look in the directory /mswindoze. If the word "user" is missing from the options list in that line in /etc/fstab, you will have to be root to do the mount. Or maybe FC6 set you up with sudo. Try "sudo mount /mswindoze" and if sudo doesn't do it, use su (substitute user) to do it as root. Such as "su mount /mswindoze"

If there is no such line in /etc/fstab, you have to find your NTFS partition and spell out how you want it mounted. Is it on the first drive? What is the output of "fdisk -l /dev/hda"? The second drive on the first ATA channel is /dev/hdb. Or if you use Serial ATA drives, which Linux uses via its SCSI subsystem, they might be /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. Guess what, you have to be root to run fdisk. We don't want unprivileged users snooping each other's files through the raw disk device.

So let's say it's the fourth partition on your second Parallel ATA drive and FC6 didn't do anything helpful. First make a directory where you want the partition to show up. Let's call it /c-colon. We'll make the directory, mount the partition, and look inside. You will have to be root or maybe use sudo to get away with this:

mkdir /c-colon
mount -r -t ntfs /dev/hdb3 /c-colon
ls /c-colon

About now you're wondering what the modern way was. In KDE, you right-click on the desktop and pick the "create new device hard disk" item from the popup menu. This should (if FC6 set up KDE properly) create a little picture of a hard drive on your desktop. You still have to know which partition you want, though. Click on it once and a Konqueror desktop browser will open on it. GNOME has something like that too.