How to Use ‘du’ to Find Files Exceeding a Specific Size in Linux

It sounds to me like you should go look at the NTFS permissions on those directories on the Windows XP computer. My guess is that the user account you're using to mount those from the Fedora box doesn't have rights.

Since it's XP Media Center the "Security" tab of the folder properties might be hidden. From a command-prompt, you can use the CACLS command (as below) to list the permissions:

CACLS C:\Directory1

The output of CACLS is somewhat easy to parse, but you can post the output here as an edit to your question if you're having trouble with it.

What Windows username are you specifying in the arguments to your mount on Linux?

Edit:

Okay-- so w/o a username and password specified you're connecting as "guest". The permission "Everyone:F" is allowing that to work.

The NTFS permissions on those directories are the same. If you create a new file in each directory from either the Windows or Linux machine you should see the same access. Try that and make sure it works.

I'm wondering if you have permissions set on individual files in "directory2". Since XP Media Center "hides" the "Security" tab by default (if I remember properly), try a CACLS referencing an individual file that's giving you problems in "directory2". I suspect you'll find that it has different permissions than "directory2" itself. Did you happen to move files into "directory2" from elsewhere on the hard disk drive of the computer?

As of GNU coreutils 7.5 released in August 2009, sort allows a -h parameter, which allows numeric suffixes of the kind produced by du -h:

du -hs * | sort -h

If you are using a sort that does not support -h, you can install GNU Coreutils. E.g. on an older Mac OS X:

brew install coreutils
du -hs * | gsort -h

From sort manual:

-h, --human-numeric-sort compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)