Hello, I have 2 hdd (1st for Linux, 2nd for windows). When I installed Linux on 1st hdd I switch off 2nd hdd with windows. So, now my Linux (CentOS5) doesn't see 2nd hdd. Explain me please what to do.
P.S. Really sorry for the stupid question and bad English.

You can probably access your second hard disk by putting an entry for that drive in the file /etc/fstab and rebooting. You can get an explanation of what fstab does by entering this command from the command line:

man fstab

If you don't understand the explanation then post a copy of your /etc/fstab here and somebody can help you fix the problem.

--------------------------
Steve Stites

Also "/sbin/fdisk -l" from a terminal would be useful.

even an ls of your /dev/ directory would be cool.

What exactly do you mean when you say you switched off the drive?
Did you unplug it? Obviously you can't access a drive which is unplugged.

Milachek

When you say "Switched off" the Windows drive, do you mean that you cannot boot up into Windows? If that is the case, then you need to set up dual booting. When you power on the PC there should be a menu appear called the Grub menu that allows you to choose between Centos and Windows. If it doesn't appear you may need to press the ESC key just after the BIOS screen has finished. If Windows is not in the menu, you will need to add it to the file /boot/grub/.menu.lst (see the comments in that file).

If you just want to access the data on the Windows drive, then you need to mount it, but you need to find the name of the drive. It should be something like /dev/hdb1 or /dev/sdb1. You need to find out from the command that syg00 gave above. However there may be other issues if the Windows is using the NTFS file system rather than FAT32, as I don't think Centos has support for NTFS installed; you need to install it manually.

If you can provide some further guidance about what you need, we can provide more specific help.

Ken

Thanks you all.
I just wont to mount my hdd like that: mount /dev/hdb1 /home/Milachek/windows -t ntfs (I didn't know such command).
All your's help helped me very much.

Sorry to say, but one more problem again. After I added my ntfs disks everything is cool (they work perfectly), but after restart system, Linux didn't see added ntfs disks. So tell me please is there any function that can saved my configuration. Thanks

When you reboot linux, all of the items in /etc/fstab are processed. /etc/fstab is where to store information about your 2nd hard disk. You need to add an entry at the end of fstab. man fstab for more info.

Post a copy of your fstab to continue.

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0

There's a bunch of ways to set up disks in linux.

So theres more things you'll need look at.

You can post the output here to continue the discussion.

#1. A list of Mounted Partitions

cat /etc/mtab

#2. a list of partitions on each disk
# (see note below before doing this)

sudo fdisk /dev/hda
# or maybe
fdisk /dev/sda

#3. sudo fdisk /dev/hdb
# or maybe
fdisk /dev/sdb

#4. Directory listings relevant to disks

ls -l /dev/disk/*
ls -l /dev/hd* # this one might be empty
ls -l /dev/sd* # this one might be empty

#5. Information about logical volumes set up in physical partitions.

# sudo pvscan

#6. If you have installed hwinfo

hwinfo --disk


You should at least know what these commands do before using them.
The standard advice is to use man on each one

These commands give you a lot of data that can help you understand what goes on with disks in linux.
These work on Ubuntu. If you're running a different distro (Red Hat I presume?) some of the commands may differ.

Note:
fdisk is used to partition disks.
it also lists the partitions.

when fdisk starts you'll see a command line

Command (m for help): m

take a look at the help while you're here.
I advise using none of them except "p print the partition table"
be extra careful, you DO NOT want to repartition your drive.

p is safe.
then just q (for quit without saving changes)

save the output

You'll need to run fdisk to list both disks.

it looks like this:

fdisk /dev/hda

here's what I got on one of my 5 disks

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 1 2550 20482843+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdd2 2551 24321 174875557+ 83 Linux

The bottom line on this is: In order to have the NTFS partition after a reboot, you will have to be set it up in /etc/fstab.

a single line is needed to do this
it will probably look something like this:

UUID=720CAF9F0CAF5D3B /media/windows-d3p1 ntfs auto 0 0

yeah this should do it, and next time let linux see the partition so you don't have to do all this stuff manually.

Hi Milachek

It looks like you just need to add a line to the end of your /etc/fstab that says much the same thing. This will automatically mount the disk when Linux starts

/dev/hdb1 /home/Milachek/windows ntfs defaults 0 1

Ken

Kenarkies, I agree with you, but I am such a "noob" that I even don't know how to open and edit fstab like root, help me please. Thank you.