Hello All, I have been poking around, and gathering up info, but the one thing I cant seem to get a grip on is the mounting of a windows drive (partition) on my linux desktop.

I just installed SuSe 8.2 Pro yesterday... Dual booting with XP-Pro. All in all it went well I was really impressed with the whole package. A BIG Difference from the RH I had a few years ago when nothing worked right . I noticed when I first loggin in (Using KDE) there were 3 partitions (win) on my desktop, I have 4.

In my research I thought I read that you need to have a drive either FAT/FAT32 to share with Linux, as NTFS is really not recommended. So that is why I have a 5 gig FAT32 parition, and this is the one I want to be mounted on my desktop when I log in as this will be the one for sharing across Linux and XP.

I DONT want the others showing up! As they are NTFS and I realy dont need them there. But They Automatically showed up, where the F: (FAT32) drive did not.

Can anyone assist? If you know how fill me in. If not can you point in the right direction where to get this info. I dont want to screw anyhting up as it seems to be running fine, and I just want to customize it to my liking.

thanks in advance for any help.

to remove the other ntfs drives you will have to edit /etc/fstab (don't forget to make a backup!)

remove the lines that hold your unwanted ntfs drives.

are you familiar with the hd* linux hd naming scheme? hda, hdb, etc?

jpbarto

ok I think I can do that. That will just remove the (mappings) mounting of the drives correct? This will not do anything to the partition itself correct?

I dabbled with Linux years ago. Im kinda familiar with the naming convention. I have two drives so the primary (windows XP) would be hda right? and the slave (the drive where linux is installed is hdb? right. At least from what I seen last night.

Now when I edit this file can I just add the FAT32 partition here that I want mounted? Also I just realized when I was insatlling that it did not see the FAT32 partition, can this be a prob?

I have this on my win drive: "hda"

C:\ XP Pro
D:\ DVD Drive
E:\ My Drive
F:\ Linux Share

All NTFS Excaept for F:. On my desktp now in Suse is c,d.e no f. but I also have a DVD icon as well, could it be that d: in linux is actually the f: drive? I dont know just a thought while im thinking .

Now the linux drive is: "hdb"
2 partitions

Linux OS
Spare Space "not used"

Also should I unmount them first before editing the file, or just go ahead and make the change? I know its a lot of questions for something that may be easy, but Im juts trying to gather up the info to print out to take home with me, this way after work I can get things setup.

by removing the entries from fstab you will not effect the partitions.

whether you umount the drives or not really makes no difference, fstab is only referenced when a drive is mounted / unmounted ... however if you don't want to reboot then you will have to manually unmount the drives then remove them from fstab.

you're right about which drive is hda and hdb.

to find out what partitions are on your first win drive type

fdisk -l /dev/hda ## (type as root)

best bet is the last partition listed is your F drive.

probably /dev/hda3 by the looks of it.

let me know if you have more questions.
jpbarto

Thanks jpbarto... I appreciate your help here, I will try it tonight when I get in. So thats it huh to get it mounted cool. I will keep you posted.

Hi NauticX

To mount a FAT32 filesystem on Boot-up

Create a mount point first :

Open Console : type

su
Then type your root password

mkdir /mnt/windows

Then - open /etc/fstab with:

kedit /etc/fstab

Then - put an entry at the bottom of your /etc/fstab file on a new line - (just substitute in your Partition, Mount point and User ID number in place of my example ones)

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat auto,uid=501,umask=000 0 0

You can get your User ID Number by opening a Console and typing:

id username – (substitute username with whatever your username is)

Look for the

uid=xxx

This is your user id number

Thanks jpbarto and Skyline... I did as mentioned form both post and it worked fine. I now have the FAT32 Share mounted, and none of the other windows drives. Although I could not get to kedit from the Konsole, I just did evrything by loggin in as root.

This is cool Linux sure has changed form the days of RH3or4 I cant remember the version but that was the last time I used it. Although there are some things Im not sure of I know with time things will get clearer. Although I dont know how much time I will devote to using this OS Im certainly going to try to use it daily to get a good grip on things.

Right now Im using Konqueror while posting and it feels wierd not using IE.

Now I just need to setup my Mac OSX box to connect to this one while Im using Suse. Cool thanks again I really appreciate your help.

NauticX