Hi,

Im having real difficulty with some drive basics.

I have been trying to mount an external drive that I have formatted into ext3 format. When I mount the drive it wont let me write to it. I have tried the fstab file but I cant edit that, it says I dont have permission.
How can I get this drive to automatically mount and allow me write permission?

Also in the process of trying to mount my external I have accidentally moved the contents of the standard Home directory and now none of the desktop links to my documents work. The contents are now located at /home rather than /mnt/home I tried moving them and now have a copy of the folder but that no real use to me. I just want it back to how it was.

Im still very new to all this but have spent hours trying to find answers online but there are just too many differing options out there.

Thanks

Chris

Honestly I would install Ubuntu Netbook Remix. I had a Linpus Aspire One and I got fed up with it within 24 hours.

To get write permission you might need to prefix your commands with sudo so that you perform them as root.

To mount a drive manually:

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/mydrive -o rw,user,users

where /dev/sdb1 is the pendrive's device node (type dmesg after plugging it in to see what it might be) and /mnt/mydrive is the directory where you want to mount it.

I tried that bit of code, this is the result:

[user@localhost disk-1]$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 6720248 4362652 2016220 69% /
none 252364 4 252360 1% /dev/shm
/dev/mmcblk0p1 991488 176 991312 1% /media/disk
posix-overlay(/media/disk)
991488 176 991312 1% /tmp/posixdir
/dev/sr0 2979822 2979822 0 100% /media/DVD
/dev/sdb2 150633120 192076 142789288 1% /media/disk-1
[user@localhost disk-1]$ sudo mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/mydrive -o rw,user,users
mount: mount point /mnt/mydrive does not exist

Also do you know how to get my Home directory back again?

Sorry for my ignorance

Chris

You'd have to create the directory /mnt/mydrive, that was just an example!

Also it looks to me like your pendrive might be mounted on /media/disk-1.

I don't know how to get your home directory back because I don't really understand what you've done to it!

I tried to mount my external drive within the home folder. When I did that it moved the home folder to /home.

I have retried the code with the right directory destination.

sudo mount /media/disc /mnt/External -o rw,user,users

I was asked to insert the file system type where in the code do I need to add this? (its ext3)

Chris

at the end add -t ext3

but the code you have won't work. The first path is to the device node (/dev/sdb1, or /dev/sdc1, it depends where the system puts it when you plug the drive in). You can't mount /media/disc because that's a folder, not a device node.

Everything in Linux is represented as a file. So although everything under /dev/ looks like a regular file, each one actually represents some sort of device on the system - a hard drive, graphics card, clock, etc. You need to find the node that corresponds to your drive when you plug it in. The easiest way is to plug it in and type dmesg and one of the last messages should say something like 'attaching to /dev/sdb1' (I can't remember exactly)

You can totally avert this problem by installing a distro that is setup for you to mount any drive on command
via filemanager

Many distros have this ability built in
suach as Ubuntu, KNOPPIX, PMagic, Puppy, and Slax

I would encourage you; chriscollins88
to try any Ubuntu-9.04
including Phalanx-9.04-LXDE
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Syste...DE-52442.shtml

a little shakeNbake project that has the 3 best browsers(Opera/Firefox/Chromium), cool apps, flash10, and many other attributes
not found in any other distro!

I built Phalanx off of Masonux-9.04
http://sites.google.com/site/masonux/

any 9.04 will do good there, Xubuntu too