How do I get access to the other file systems on my HDD?
 

I have several partition on my linux drive with 3 differnt distros installed. I would like to be able to at least read the files in the other distros.

How can I do this.

I assume I have to do something like mount them but I am not sure how to do this.

I also need to ensure that the relevant partitions are mounted at boot so I would be greatfull if someone could tell me the entries I need to make to my fstab file.

Thanks for any replies to this basic question.

If you can't figure it out after issuing and reading "man mount" and "man fstab" and searching here and at Google <Linux>, post back what you read, what you did, what happened; and we'll go from there. Fair enough?

Another thing to watch. You may also need to check if the 3 distro's use a different UID for your user account. Also, you could use the same /home partition on all three distro's. The easiest way would be to have 3 separate partitions, something like /home/username-slack, /home/username-suse, /home/username-xubuntu. The home directory entries in /etc/passwd would need to reflect this.

This would allow you to replace one of the distro's yet retain the /home partition.
Using a symbolic link to a Documents folder and a Downloads folder would allow you to work in whatever distro you are using without having to search another distro's home folder for something.

jschiwal, I have already set up the home folders, they each have their own partition.

What I would like to do is to access the root directory of one distro form another.

How about if I mount them via /mnt/

so, i would;

mkdir /mnt/distro2
mount /mnt/sda3 (assuming distro2 is on sda3)

That way I should be able to access the root of distro2.

I could also put an entry in my fstab
/dev/sda3 /mnt/disrto2 ext2 users,umask=0000 0 0

Will this work?