Using disk partitions
 

Hi.
I installed opensuse on a 10 gig partition on my old 20 gig HDD. I had planned to use the remaining 10 gigs to try out other distros. Now I want to get opensuse use the other 10 gigs to. How can i do that?

What i have tried:
1] Made an entry in fstab called /dev/hda4 (the parition label)
The partition type is ext3. But I also left the other two columns for this entry in the fstab file blank, coz I dont know what do I put in there.
2] Created a folder on the desktop called part2
3] Then, as root, I did this : mount /dev/hda4 /home/ecuas/Desktop/part2

This mounted the hard disk, but only with read only permissions. I tried changing the permissions as root, but got the msg that "Permissions cannot be changed. Is a read only disk"
I cannot write any data to the disk either as root or as a user.
What should I do so that linux recognizes this partition as a 'part' of the existing system and can freely read-/write to it?

Umount the partition. Then edit your /etc/fstab file as root. Usually system defaults for linux partitions are read and write. Here is how to code it for defaults.

These are two partitons on my two disk system, with system defaults. If system defaults do not work, add 'r/w' as an option.

If nothing works, please post the exact coding you have in your fstab file for this partition.

Hope this helps.

Use this for your fstab entry for hda4:

/dev/hda4 /home/ecuas/Desktop/part2 ext3 user,noauto,defaults 1 2

If hda4 is already mounted, unmount hda4. Then run as root,

# mount /dev/hda4
# chmod -R 777 /home/ecuas/Desktop/part2

That should do it. The above fstab entry will let any user mount hda4; you don't need to be root. Also, hda4 will not automount at boot. If you want to change this behaviour, drop "user" if you want only root to be able to mount and drop "noauto" if you want hda4 to auotmount at boot.

Thanks. I'll try this n get back to u.