ive been tryin to get my music and media (20+ gigs) from a windows partition on my hard drive in ntfs format to my redhat 8 partition. and ive been having a freakin complicated time. i cant mount the partition as ntfs because my kernel doesnt support it. i tried adding in support but couldnt compile properly. now i also have a cd full of mp3''s that i burned a while ago as backup for my windows, but for some reason i can use them. xmms wont play them directly, and if i copy them across i get input/output error and the file is there but still does not play in xmms. help please, i want my media.

I have Redhat 8 too and I've read that out of the box, for fear of patent issues, Redhat disabled NTFS kernel support and concern about royalty fees, they also removed MP3 decoder. I didn't even try the "Ask Shadowman" directions on Redhat's site to re-enable NTFS by recompiling - instead go to http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ and get the RPM to install. As for playing MP3's, I didn't try that, instead I used CDex in Windows to convert my audio CDs to Ogg format instead which xmms in Redhat supports out of the box. In your case, with so many MP3s it's probably not practical to convert to Ogg - try xmms's site and download their version which I assume comes with MP3 support, maybe? Good luck.