I have just installed Debian (Woody) on my laptop.

I created 4 partitions. Two for Linux (hda1, hda5- swap) and two for Windows XP Pro (hda3, hda4 - both are Fat32).

The windows partitions are displayed as optional boot drives in LILO and I can boot XP Pro from hda3 no problems.

But when I try to mount hda4 I have no success.

I wanted to be able to share hda4 between the two OS's.

I entered the following lines into /etc/fstab

"/dev/hda4 /hda4 vfat ro,user,noauto 0 0"

which I copied from the fstab entry for my cdrom.

When I type "mount /hda4", I keep getting the message:
"/hda4 isnt a valid mount point"

What else could be going wrong.

It has taken me over two weeks to get to this point and I have nearly given up on the dual boot idea.

Please help.

Thanx

Do you have a /hda4 directory? If not, use
mkdir /hda4
(as root) and it'll be created. Then your mount command should work.