My PC had two disks - hda with a dual-boot consisting of 1) windows Xpro 2) Linux swap and 3) Linux Suse v8.1 (root) - hdb with 2 NTFS-partitions.

It all worked fine, but then I needed more space on the second hard disk and got a new one, which I formated using Xpro into 3 NTFS-partitions.

Before - Suse let med access the second hard disk's 2 partitions as windows D and windowsE

After the change I cannot access the second harddisk when running Linux - so my question is: How do I make Linux accept the new windows-based harddisk (which only contains data)?

/etc/fstab did contain to entries from the old system, which I had to comment out, otherwise I got some errors when booting.

But how do I make Linux detect the new harddisk - can anyone tell me of a method to put 3 entries into the fstab-file, is there a program (autodetect) or a third method?

By the way: Linux does accept the new disk as a hardware component, but it cannot automatically see the the NTFS-partitions.

Thanks for your patience and understanding ;-)

Sincerely,

fdisk -l
will list all your partition information.
if you are certain the old partitions were ntfs, and
so are the new ones, you can edit the 2 old fstab lines
to correspond to 2 of the new partitions, and add a third
one identical to the others, except forf the partition number.
for example, your old disk partitions may have been,
/dev/hdb5 and dev/hdb6, and you may have the new one
set as /dev/hdb1 /dev/hdb2 /dev/hdb3,
or some combination of the above. if fstab cannot
find the partitions listed, it will complain. it should.
but if your partitions get changed, they will not get
loaded.

thanks to whansard for the firm and swift reply.

I did what you proposed, edited the fstab file.

My old partitions were NOT ntfs, they were in fact fat32, but I copied the information from the one ntfs partition I had on hda, and then I could use one partition on hdb - but only one and funny enough - not the first one, but the second !?

So I got at least one partition working (and even the one I needed the most), so I'll look more into the details of the ntfs definition, which at present looks like this:

/dev/hdb1 /windows/D ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=iso8859-1 0 0

My conclusion right now is that I can reach one ntfs-partition on each disk - so maybe I should look closer from a windows viewpoint on how they actually are setup.

Thanks again - it helped me alot

Sincerely,

Hans

you may not have the mount point existing that you have
set up?
/dev/hdb1 /windows/D ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=iso8859-1 0 0

the directory /windows/D has to exist
if you made another entry with /windows/E and the
directory /windows/E does not exist, it will not mount.

you've got the ro flag, read-only, which is necessary for
ntfs too. make sure your other lines are the same there.

True enough, I didn't have the /windows/E mount-point, so I made it, and then I discovered another peculiarity.

My second IDE-disk only seems to have 1 (one) partition - which can be seen from the log:

<6>Partition check:
<6> hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 < hda5 >
<6> hdb: hdb1

Then I checked my Windows partitions and discovered, that the second disk - as a data disk - had 2 partitions, which were not basic ntfs, but dynamic.

Maybe that could be the problem, that I don't even recall what I have done, when partitioning my new disk. Obviously Windows has more ways of structuring a disk than they used to - so I'll look into that eventually.

My last question in this context relates to disk #1, which seems to have 5 partitions according to the log above: hda5 being the ntfs-partition, which I succeeded in mounting as windows/D

As far as I know, Suse v8.1 only produces 2 partitions, swap and /(root), but somehow it now seems as if it actually makes a third partition (/boot ??)

I am saying this, because I use Suse in this way because it gives me the possibility of making two windows partions on one disk - which is nice, since I can then separate system/progs from my own personal data, when running af dual-boot mode.

Of course the second disk contains more personal data, and I am comtemplating to reorganize it into simple fat32-partions - except I miss the security, when my children uses the system ;-)

hda4 is an extended partition which contains the logical
drive hda5. you don't actually mount hda4.
look at it again with fdisk -l and you will see that they
occupy the same space. you could put your entire linux
install in an extended partition and have that one split up.
you could have hda1, hda2, hda3 all windows stuff, and
hda4 split into hda5, and hda6 or whatever you want.