hi

any help here would be better than a blank brain! my problem is i have created a new 'Photos' partition under ebian 4.0 using gparted. gparted returned no errors, but nautilus says

unable to mount the selected volume

libhal-storage.c 1401 : info: called libhal_free_dbus_error but dbuserror was not set.

process 10243: applications must not close shared connections - see dbus_connection_close() docs. this is a bug in the application.

error: device /dev/hda2 is not removable

error: could not execute pmount

as you can see, the device is on /dev/hda2, but i cannot work out for the life of me why i cant mount it. HEEELP!

ps. if ive missed anything out (bar punctuation lol), please let me know

james waples, 14

You created the partition, but did you create the file system on it?

Yep a bare partition with no file system can not be mounted..

man mkfs.ext3

mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda2

umm... i dont think so. thanks so much for your help. i didnt think of that, so the saying 'you learn something new every day' really does work then!

thanks

james

i have just tried that to no avail. would it be because the partition has no mount point. gparted also reads it as ext3, so my question is: how do i change the mount point of the partition?

thanks

james

can you manually mount the partition ?


Open a shell and as root, try the following

mkdir /media/photos
mount /dev/hda2 /media/photos
cd /media/photos
mount

Does mount show the drive as mounted now ?
Can you create a file on the drive ?

If that works then you can edit your /etc/fstab file to add a mount point that will be available automatically at boot time.



If that Doesn't work ywould you post the output of the following commands here ?

mount

fdisk -l

Then we can see what is mounted and what drives and partitions are available on your system.

A partition without filesystem cannot be mounted - and if mounted mkfs would refuse to work.
You could try the -f switch to mkfs.
gparted reads it as ext3 because before the space belonged to a partition with ext3 on it(?)

It could be that you solve this by rebooting - not like the fix-all-solution for windows...but:
the partition table (layout) has changed - it could be that the kernel has problems even seeing the new partition - and thus cannot work on it.
After rebooting the creation of a filesystem there should be no problem.
There could be a way without rebooting - but I don't know it.

thanks very much.

i have tried the

mkdir /media/photos
mount /dev/hda2 /media/photos
cd /media/photos
mount

solution and it seems to work, so ta muchly, people!

so now if you wish for that to mount automatically at every boot, you need to add an entry in your /etc/fstab file.

If you wish for PHOTOS to mount in a different location, say for instance under your home directory, you need to create a folder for it to use as a mount point in your home directory, then alter your fstab so that partition mounts to that folder..

As your normal user..

mkdir ~/photos

As root edit your /etc/fstab file

cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak - Back up your fstab file before starting
nano /etc/fstab - Edit the file using nano, pico, vi or whatever you feel comfortable with

Add a line at the end of your /etc/fstab file like the following
after that the partition should mount as /home/username/photos automatically every time you boot your machine.

yeah. i have done that already and everything is working fantastically. thanks for all the help lads. i feel like such an idiot, but i had no second clue, so thanks again.

james