Simple mounting question.
 

Hey y'all, this should be nice and easy. If I want to mount a fat32 partition, does it matter whether the type is defined as vfat or msdos or auto or what? Using the mandrake control center and the partitioning tool I made a little fat32 partition and the fstab entry was:

/dev/hda8 /mnt/windows vfat umask=0 0 0

Upon reboot the filesystem did not mount. I've tried other combinations like

/dev/hda8 /mnt/windows msdos defaults 0 0

but nothing works. Trying to mount it under linuxconf gives me an error (same error as the mandrake control center) and a return code 32. What's the dilly? Also, what should a proper fstab entry look like for a fat32 drive? Especially all those options after the file type. Thanks a bunch.

you need to format the partition (hda8) from windows. then try this from konsole

mount -t vfat /dev/hda8 /mnt/windows

if this doesnt gives any error, then file system is loaded properly.

Well the only difference that I noticed when using vfat instead of msdos to mount my windows partition, was that vfat supports long filenames.

So with vfat the directory "Program Files", shows up as "Program Files"
Under msdos it shows up as "Program~1"

There might be some other differences, but I have noticed them.

One more thing, be sure that there is a directory called mnt/windows.

Also can you tell us what error message you get?

You're right about the long filename difference. That is the only difference. I did have a /mnt/windows directory too so I don't know what that problem was. I'm over that now and I'm trying something completely different. :-) As for the error message, it said something like 'cannot mount /dev/hda8 because incorrect parameters, something else, or too many other filesystems already mounted. return 32' That's pretty much the jist of it. Right now I'm running a 15GB fat32 primary partition followed by a 256MB primary partition for / a 256MB swap partition and 3 more partitions of various sizes for /var, /usr, and /home. I'm booting a program called MBR from the MBR on the fat32 partition and it goes to LILO on the / partition of /dev/hda2...or was it /dev/hda5? Anyway, MBR calls LILO which is on the / filesystem. I'm using Debian to setup a LFS system. This will be very interesting I'm sure. I just finished formating the fat32 partition with format.exe from a MS boot disk like anil suggested. We'll see if Debian can mount it. Thanks for the help y'all. If you'd like I can keep posting on this thread about all my various partitioning endeavors.