Modem, 2nd HD, and USB FD problems
 

I installed RedHat Linux 9 yesterday and got it all set up and everything, been playing the games and what not since I can't get on the internet yet. I have run into 3 problems (2 may be the same thing):

1. I need a new modem unless I can find drivers for a U.S. Robotics 56K Faxmodem. And by contemplating on buying a new modem, I have concluded 2 things:
A) It needs to be external, because I have read in numerous places that internal ones are few and far between.
B) It needs to be a serial (RS-232) modem.

2. I can't access my second hard drive due to the fact that it is formatted in NTFS. I have not the slightest on how to get it up and running.

3. I can't access my USB SanDisk Cruzer Micro 256MB drive either. It is formatted in FAT16 and I refuse to reformat it due to the information on it is very important (term papers).

I assume that by using Nautilus I am looking directly at what would be the user's files that aren't supposed to be shared. I am also wondering how to look directly at the hard drive and all its contents or if I already am by just going to the root or base directory "/".

Hi,

I hope I might have some answers for you :D

1 A) It does need to be external, because most internal are "WinModems" and use special windows drivers, however you could try ndiswrapper (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/), its free! I have little experience with this, but it is well supported by its community.

1 B) I would have thought that it could be USB... but again I don't know... the issue is linux support so you just need to find one that is supported in linux thats within your budget. Try this sites HCL (http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php).

2. This one is fairly easy to fix. This project should help: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/redhat9.html at the moment I think it just gives you the ability to read data rather than write it. I have used it personally for that purpose on Fedora Core 2

3. This is supposedly compatable with linux. Is there anything vaguely hopeful looking at the end of dmesg (open a terminal/shell window and type 'dmesg' (no quotes) after plugging it in... there should be something there)?

4. '/' is the equivalent of c:\ on a windows HD

Looks like a new modem. scanModem told me: 3com/USRobotics: unsupported:tisk: :(
Thanks though.

Besides that, My HD still doesn't like me and refuses to mount. How would I go about reformatting it?. I mean I don't want to lose the stuff on it, but I would rather have it then lose the stuff on it. Anyways it was stuff like AIM so I don't think it would run under Linux.

As always, thanks for your help.

what are the errors that come up when you mount it? did you install the correct NTFS drivers for your kernel?

There is a bit of a problem with copy and pasting the errors due to the fact that the computer is upstairs and isn't hooked up to this one at all. The errors went something like this:

I type in "mount /dev/hdb1". I get "mount: can't find /dev/hdb1 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab file" or something along those line. I go and open up those files and look at them and hdb1 isn't in either.

Same thing with my Cruzer Micro. I type "mount /dev/sda1" and I get "mount: can't find /dev/sda1 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab".

AH! Right the issue is a misunderstanding of the mount command.

First you need to create a directory under /mnt. This is the directory you will mount the device onto. This can be done using the following code (note that this needs to be done in root, donoted by the #, which symbolises the prompt).

Now we can perform the mounting of the Hard Disk (hopefully!) using the following command:

because there is not and entry in the /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab files then it doesn't know what to do when you type in your command. However this command tells it which device to mount and where to mount it.

The same should work with your usb stick, but create a separate directory under the /mnt directory to avoid confusion.

The mount command needs be used as:

Hope that gets us a bit further!

We got that working so far. I can see my hard drive. :) . Now just to get that TRENDware modem to connect to the net. Thanks for you help pnh73!

Now that I got what I needed off of my second HD, how do I reformat it? I just want a blank hard drive to add stuff to after I (re)format it.

Do you want this HD to just be read by linux? If so then the best course of action is to format it to ext3 (which is the standard linux filesystem). This can be done using the following command:

OR

To make it readable and writeable in both linux and windows you need to format it as a VFAT partition. This can be done using the following command:

This will format the partition at hdb1 to requested filesystem and then can be mounted appropriately.

As this will be a permenant addition to your linux system i suggest adding it to the /etc/fstab file as this will make mounting a lot easier. The following line should do it if you were mounting on /mnt/hdb1. This will mount the partition at boot time automatically. (swap 'ext3' for 'vfat' if you formatted it as vfat)

See http://www.humbug.org.au/talks/fstab/fstab.html for more information on the format of /etc/fstab

I no longer need it for windows, so I would just need to partition/format/whatever it for RedHat Linux 9.

ext3 it is then!

so with Ext3 I can read and write in linux to this hard drive? I have to wait about 10 minutes before I can because of a download for linux. Thanks for helping me get my USB drive set up so I can get these necessary files for this stuff.

Yeh, ext3 is the the most commonly used linux filesystem. It is unreadable on windows as far as i know...

That worked. ;) Now to get the money for the modem. Thanks again.