After a hugger-mugger of up-dates to my Linux installation, I found myself unable to access the Windows NTFS partition on my computer while running Linux.

I had been using the NTFS-3G driver to support such access. NTFS-3G, in turn, uses the fuse file-system API to support such access. Red Hat doesn't support fuse with their kernels, and I don't want to manually rebuild support for it, nor to wait on someone else to do so, whenever Red Hat releases a new kernel, so I support fuse by way of dkms. Thus, to access the Windows NTFS partition, I was using packages

• dkms-x.x.x.x-x.noarch.rpm
• fuse-x.x.x-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm
• dkms-fuse-x.x.x-x.nodist.rf.noarch.rpm
• fuse-ntfs-3g-x.xxxx-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm

Anyway, when I would try to mount the Windows NTFS partition, I would get a message that /lib/modules/2.6.18-xx.el5/extra/fuse.ko did not exist. There was actually a directory entry for it, but that entry was a redirection to a non-existent file.

As it turned-out, something had gone wrong with my up-dating from RHEL 5.2 to RHEL 5.3, and not only did I not have the most recent versions of the kernels installed, but there was a version mis-match between the kernel to which I was booting and the associated -devel[opment] package. dkms was thus unable to automatically rebuild the fuse file-system interface.

I installed the most recent versions of the kernel and their associated -devel packages, rebooted the system, uninstalled and then reïnstalled fuse-x.x.x-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm, dkms-fuse-x.x.x-x.nodist.rf.noarch.rpm, and fuse-ntfs-3g-x.xxxx-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm. (I doubt that I needed to uninstall and reïnstall fuse-x.x.x-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm and fuse-ntfs-3g-x.xxxx-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm, but I didn't and don't want to bother puzzling that out.) I was then again able to access the Windows NTFS partition.