I recently got a buddy of mine to install RedHat and so far so good except he asked me what entry in /dev/ is his window 2k partition and his win98 partition...

I couldn't give him an answer, I've always used either one drive or a GUI-based config app (like utillities that Mandrakes Control panel offer)

So not only am I trying to find an answer for my friend but for myself aswell.. I need to learn this! kinda scary I haven't

He has two CDroms
and two hdd's one with 3 partions and the other, 2

I've found (though i lost it already) a link to a page describing how the hdaX, hdcX, etc. etc. work but another questions in addition to thtat is, will the "hd" entries under /dev/ only be there when the drive is present? or are their files simply named "hdxx" by default which are null until a drive is plugged in?



wow... tired like always hope that makes sense!
anyhelp would be great.

ok then... right.... older linux systems (and often the more hardcore aswell) will contain a totally flat /dev/ structure, i.e. it is fixed, permanent, and generally considered exhaustive, menaing that 99% of block devies that *could* exist already have an entry there. this then contrasts with some newer distros that use the devfsd system, which dynamically generates a virtual /dev tree each boot, and creates what's needed, conceptually making more sense and making it easier to use.

now, where you come in is that the drive will be under /dev/hda more than likely and probably hda1 if you run "fdisk -l" you should gewt a list of all attached hard drives along with the partitions on it. obviously the windows partitions will therefore be the ones listed as FAT32 or NTFS.