so if FAT does not support symlinks does not support this, then am i unable to do this process?

You could use rsync command, it has an option not to copy symlinks ... if i remember correctly. Symlinks would be useless in Windows anyway.

Could you show me the command for that and the placement?

No, I do not do spoonfeeding, you are a Gentoo admin after all, right? But you can show it to yourself by doing

I wouldn't really consider myself a Gentoo Admin, I'm just learning this as I go which by the way is pretty awesome. But thanks anyways.

Chrisroot,

I had to be away for awhile. It looks as though the main issue here is that your USB drive was not actually mounted when you copied the files (which is odd, seeing as though you mentioned the command executed successfully). We'll go at it one step at a time from now on, since if the block device is not actually mounted at the time you are copying the files, the mount point is just a local directory.

Here's what I would do now:

- create a new mount point (I would avoid asking you to erase files from the current mount point in order to be as safe as possible)

- plug in your USB drive if not already done

- verify its block device with the command

... to make sure it is still known as /dev/sdc1

- mount it to the new mount point:

- verify block devices and mount points again with the command df -lh ... it should read the following for your USB drive:

- copy again:

- verify if files are copied :

- verify USB drive is still mounted with the command df -lh ... it should again read the following for your USB drive:

- change directories away from the mount point and unmount the USB drive:

- it is important that you don't get any errors here

- unplug your USB drive

- verify if files are visible on Windows machine.

... I wouldn't worry about symlinks - the rest of the files should be readable.

Let us know if at any of the steps, you get unexpected results.

Cheers - don't give up ! :-)

@ OP

I think this article might help a bit. Of course, there will be instructions that are already mentioned here in the article as well as adding the usb entry to /etc/fstab if you want to. However, it focuses on allowing all users to mount a usb stick. Not sure if you want this or not.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Removable_media

2 members found this post helpful.

Is it possible to remove a directory from "SDC1", there are too many file systems attached to it ?

... not sure what you're asking here, Chrisroot ... /dev/sdc1 is your USB drive.

Could you please clarify ?

Thx.

Sorry i typed the command " mount -t vfat /dev/sdc1 /mnt/new_drive_c" to mount a new and bigger usb drive. But the output stated " mount : wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on .dev.sdc1, or too many mounted file systems. So i was wondering if it's possible to delete any thing from within there to be able to mount this new usb drive.

Sounds more to me like the new USB drive is formatted as something other than FAT. Also, the new USB drive may have been assigned a different block device (i.e. ... something other than /dev/sdc1 ...)

Could you post the output of this command again while your USB drive is plugged in, please ?

Thx.

Sure,

device boot start end blocks ID System
/dev/sdc1 1 15600 125304800 7 HPFS/NTFS

OK, so the new drive is ntfs, not FAT. Hopefully your Gentoo system has the ntfs-3g file system module installed, otherwise, you will need to install it or use something else.

Instead of "-t vfat" in the mount command, use "-t ntfs-3g".

Let me know if it works or fails again.

Command---mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /mnt/new_drive_c
Output---Mount: unknow filesystem type 'ntfs-3g"

This is what I was concerned about .. It seems as though ntfs support (ntfs-3g fuse module) is not installed on your system. This is where we would need some Gentoo expertise - I am unfamiliar with Gentoo. It is known as a very customizable distro that requires a significant amount of expertise on the part of the user. As member Emerson previously stated somewhere above, Gentoo does not come pre-installed or pre-configured with anything - the sysadmin decides what is needed and installs.

So 2 choices here:

1) We find some help with Gentoo so you can install the required ntfs support. Note that this is not necessarily the best idea - whoever set up this server felt it best to leave it out in the first place, perhaps for good reason.

2) Go back to using a FAT drive. You could either use the one you were originally using or reformat the new one on another machine as FAT32.