Permissions denied when trying to mount my hard drive?
 

Hello everyone,

I just converted to Linux from Windows, and glad to be here :D I think I may have screwed up with regards to how I installed my Debian package. I was playing it safe with my initial install, so as of right now I'm actually running my new OS from a USB Stick.

Now that I see that my system hardware was compatible, I want to go ahead and install it on my hard drive and wipe out my terminally damaged windows OS. This really leads me to two questions.

Can I transfer the files from the usb stick to my hard drive without having to do another complete install?

Secondly, I noticed that when I was in my desktop under the computer tab, my 60gb hard drive was not mounted. I guess which doesn't really surprise me since I'm operating off a usb stick. So I tried to mount it through disk utilities and it came up with an error saying that permission was denied. I tried opening a root terminal and coding it that way, but I'm very unsure of what to enter. I've been reading man pages and install guides for the last 4 hours now, and I still haven't come across an answers.

I haven't put too many extras into this install yet, so if the easy answer is to just reinstall it directly to the hard drive, then I guess that would be no big deal. Thanks for taking the time to read this and any advice or instruction would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks :D

Hello and welcome to LinuxQuestions,

The best way is to do a clean install, using the entire hard disk if you want to get rid of Windows. You cannot just transfer the files on your USB stick to the hard disk and hope it will boot. It doesn't work that way. If you've installed a LiveCD on the USB you might have an option 'Install to Hard Disk' or similar. If you have that then you could use it to install Debian on your computer.

About mounting, only root has permissions to mount unless stated otherwise in /etc/fstab on a per mountpoint basis.

I'd go for a clean install, that would be the best way to go.

Looking forward to your participation in the forums. Have fun with Linux.

Kind regards,

Eric

Thank You EricTRA,

I kind of figured that a clean install was probably my best option. After searching many forum threads, and Debian related websites and not really coming up with a sure fired way to do this, I was betting that this would be my only option. I'm sure glad that I didn't add too much to the package install before having to do this :D

Thanks again for the info,

-Chris73