About finding partitions on different disks
 

First of all I am new to this forum so HI! and this is my first post ever about linux.

I have two questions:

1) Well I have both W2K and Redhat 9 installed on my computer. Unfortunately one thing that really bugs me is that I don't know how to get my other hard disks to show up in my filesystem listing when I use xterm and the df command. Most of the partitions on my hard drives are NTFS BUT I made sure to format one of the partitions using FAT32. That is I reformated one which was originally in NTFS into FAT32 before installing Linux. I am hoping to be able to access my mp3s, which I have taken painstaking the time to rip to my computer, while I am running Linux.
I get the following:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hde3 11052880 1831244 8660168 18% /
/dev/hde2 101107 9275 86611 10% /boot
none 386196 0 386196 0% /dev/shm

I have three hard disk drives. The first one contains my Redhat install (the information you see above) The other two dont even show up in the filesystem listing. Oh and when in xterm cant I use login and then root to access the root and to be able to use root commands even if I logged in graphically as a regular user???

2) Also I am wondering about what would happen if I installed an Athlon version of the kernel over my current i386 Redhat 9 version. Is this something that would make my computer run more efficiently? Moreover would this even work, or do I have to reinstall a completely different version?

When I run uname I get the following message:

Linux localhost 2.4.20-8 #1 Thu Mar 13 17:18:24 EST 2003 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

Now should I have i686 Athlon linux installed? I never noticed it when looking around the mirrors linked to the Redhat website. Anyway, my computer runs fine although I have yet to do anything in linux that really taxes my system. I am however obsessed with knowing that I am getting the most out of what I have so if upgrading CAN do some good, someone please let me know!

Thanks!!

:)

You would be hard pressed to find a difference in a kernel compiled with athlon "improvements" over what you've got. That said, you shouldn't have any problems installing an Athlon based kernel.

df shows only information on MOUNTED partitions. That's the confusion I believe. You first have to mount the partition to get df to show room on it. Try:
/sbin/fdisk -l (/SBIN/FDISK -L lowercase and as root)
to get info on your other HD's partitions. Then mount them:
mkdir /mnt/fat32
mount -t vfat /dev/hdx /mnt/fat32
Where hdx is what you find from fdisk -l above.

You are able to mount in READ ONLY mode your NTFS partitions as well. However your distro decided to leave support out from the get go, so you'll need to head over here:
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.html
And follow their instructions.

HTH

And Welcome to LQ!

Cool

Welcome to linux.

df will only display data from mounted filesystems.
Run (as root) the command fdisk -l

This will show all partitions on the drives. Then you can use this info to access your data. Here are the steps.

First add a mount point
mkdir /mnt/windows ( replace windows with or whatever you decide to call it)
chmod 777 /mnt/windows (will allow all to read / write)

Modify your /etc/fstab (as root using a text editor )
/dev/hdxy /mnt/windows vfat user,umask=000 0 0
(Where hdxy matches the FAT32 partition from the output of fdisk)


And yes you can open a console window and logon as root using the su command.

The OS should run faster if the kernel is optimized for your specific CPU. So you would have to recompile the kernel to take full advantage of your athlon. I might wait until I am a little more fimilar with linux before taking on such a task.

Thanks for letting me know how to do all of that! I am still unaccustomed to using even the basic commands. Anyway, that was VERY helpful. :)