I tried to mount 4 windows partition but got the error message.

Yeah, 'mount' has my vote for "least informative error messages ever."

The problem is more likely to be the syntax used to mount the partitions. Post the command you used, and/or the contents of your /etc/fstab file.

I've been fighting this very problem for over a week. I converted a Win98
file server containing 6 spindles and a little over a terrabyte of data (I
mention this because copying the data to "good" drives would be a major
undertaking.) to Debian Sarge, current as of 2 days ago.

I'm getting this "wrong fstype or too many mounts" error messages on some of
my drives but not others. I've eliminated all the obvious problems such as
fstab errors. Here's mine

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda5 /usr ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hda6 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdd /media/cdrom0 iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/sda /media/usb0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /D vfat rw,auto,defaults 0 2
/dev/hdc1 /C vfat rw,auto,defaults 0 2
/dev/hde1 /E vfat rw,auto,defaults 0 3
/dev/hdf1 /F vfat rw,auto,defaults 0 3
# usb ACOM drive
/dev/sda /G vfat rw,auto,defaults 0 3

Here is what "mount" returns

/dev/hda1 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/hda5 on /usr type ext3 (rw)
/dev/hdb1 on /D type vfat (rw)
/dev/hdf1 on /F type vfat (rw)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)


As we can see here, hdb1 and hdf1 mounted. hdc1 and hde won't mount. hdd1 is
the CD drive. /dev/sda is the USB drive. It won't mount either.

Dosfsck produces the following:

server:/home/jgd# dosfsck -v -r /dev/hdc1
dosfsck 2.10 (22 Sep 2003)
dosfsck 2.10, 22 Sep 2003, FAT32, LFN
Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem
File system has 2441533 clusters but only space for 2441214 FAT entries.

It does the same on /dev/hde1. If I run dosfsck on the raw device, the
following happens:

server:/home/jgd# dosfsck -v -r /dev/hdc
dosfsck 2.10 (22 Sep 2003)
dosfsck 2.10, 22 Sep 2003, FAT32, LFN
Currently, only 1 or 2 FATs are supported, not 191.

/dev/hdb (properly mounted) generates the same message so that must be a
problem with dosfsck.

Knoppix CD mounts and accesses all these drives except the USB one correctly.
All the knoppix document pages on their web site are down so I can't
investigate what they're using that works. booting the windoze recovery
floppy also lets me access and scandisk these drives.

I've googled until my dsl modem is smoking. I'm at my wit's end.

help!

Thanks,
John

Ok, lets step through this and see what we see.
First, /dev/sda is being mounted twice. Not sure why but I am pretty sure that could cause errors. You may have the intention on mounting this on purpose twice. You can mount a file or device twice. You just will not be able to access the first mount filesytem.

Hmmm, all looks good. Why do you do a #3 pass on the mounts? I cant remember what the pass option is for.

What is the output for a manual mount...
ie... mount -t vfat /dev/hde1 /E

Is this a custom kernel or an image? Just asking in case the options for this file system is not turned on. But this would not be the case because it mounted others...
Well, lets start here and let you answer the questions.

I have "fixed" this problem but I didn't want to leave it hanging. I fixed the problem by installing a new 250gb drive formatted with ext3, then copying each of the vfat drives over the network via a usb/ide adapter to my laptop. Slow but it worked.

I still don't know why this didn't work. The hardware is a 300 mhz pentium that was running Win98 as a lights-out server. I simply jacked it up and slid in Debian Sarge via a net install. Bone stock installation. All I did was configure Samba.

Answers to your questions:

Don't know anything about the #3 on the mounts. That was filled in by whatever process built /etc/fstab in the first place. All I did was move the mount points out of /mnt and to convenient points in /.

The output of a manual mount attempt was the same as with auto-mount. I tried both with "vfat" and with "auto".

Of the three drives that would not mount, one was on the motherboard IDE controller and the other two were on the Promise EIDE controller, so it wasn't a hardware incompatibility problem.

At this point, I have no idea. The server is now up and running, the monitor is off and all is well...

This conversion shows just how bad winders is. With absolutely no hardware changes, my network utilization from this laptop went from no more than 3% with Win98 serving to almost 50% with Sarge serving. That's using file manager to copy a large file across the network. My automatic backup software exceeds 50%.

One other interesting point. I use Opera as my browser. I installed it on this little 300 mhz, 128mb RAM system. It runs at the same or maybe a little faster speed as winders Opera on this 2 ghz/1gig ram XP system.

Thanks for the attempted help,

John