I just installed Feroda which is my first experience with Linux, and it went quite smoothly. I'm impressed with what I see so far, though it's a bit overwhelming at first.

The first question I'd like to ask is:

Why can't I see my Hard drives? OK, I've read that you can't see NTFS formatted drives but I made a 2GB FAT32 partition also which doesn't appear anywhere. Any ideas why that might be and what I can do about it?

Many thanks.

Before you can access a filesystem you need to mount it first - that goes for any NTFS filesystem or FAT32 filesystem - a quick search on this site will tell you how to create mount points/mount to them/use fdisk to have a look at your partition table. - Fedora can read NTFS - you just have to get the module from

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/index.html

and for the instructions to help you out:

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/instructions.html

OK thanks, I had a look at the link with the new kernel that reads NTFS but I need to back up a bit. This is my first try with linux and so I'd be happy to just have the fat32 partition visible at the moment and not get into installing a new kernel.

I have a blind spot for some reason when it comes to "mounting drives" because I'm not sure what that really means. all I know is that in windows, unless the partitions are hidden they are visible and have a drive letter assigned to them.

I have 2 hard drives. The 2nd is reserved for video editing data only. The 1st is partitioned like this:

Winxp ntfs 4GB (main)
Winxp ntfs 4GB (video editing apps)
Linux ext3 4GB
Data ntfs 24GB
Share fat32 2GB

Is fat32 the same as vfat or have I got that wrong?
How would I begin to make the fat32 partition visible in linux.

Thanks for any help.