How to mount a Fat32 partition in mandrake?
 

I have a second hard drive, it's set as slave and it's on my second IDE controller. I've formatted it to fat32 in windows and I want mandrake to recognise it too. Mandrake detected it when I accidentally booted into linux before I had formatted the drive, but I cancelled the text-based program it launched and restarted into windows to format. Now when I boot into mandrake it doesn't detect the drive or popup with anything, so how I can mount it?

im not too sure about mandrake, but this should work in anydistro

mount -t vfat /dev/hdb /windows

/windows is your mount point.... study your /etc/mtab file, and add a line for hdb .. just remember you filesystem is vfat

No good,

[root@localhost sean]# mount -t vfat /dev/hdb /mnt/backup
mount: special device /dev/hdb does not exist

The device is definitiely there as slave on my second IDE controller. It's in the bios and windows uses it fine. The master on that controller is a cd-rom if it makes any difference.

Thanks.

try /dev/hdb1 <--- i forgot about the partitioning stuff

oh wait .... on the second IDE? then it may also be /dev/hdd1

hda - master IDE 0
hdb - slave IDE 0
hdc - master IDE 1
hdd - slave IDE 1

Well, thanks for the info about hda,hdb... But I get the same message whether I use hdd, hdd0,hdd1, hdd2.. special device does not exist.

hmm .... this must be a mandrake thing. IN RH, the hard drive devices are located in /dev .... look at the /etc/fstab or the /etc/mtab files and see what the call the linux hard drive.

Maybe what you can try is to disconnect the second hard drive, boot that up once, turn off, reconnect, and boot again.

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/windows vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=000,umask=0,d
efaults 1 0

Bah, silly mouse hit post.. there. fixed now

Put the code in your /etc/fstab file all of it on one line..

changing 'hdb1' to whatever hard drive partion your vfat is on..

This is lifted right out of my Mandrake distro

Have fun,

Gary

No good.

I unplugged the disc and rebooted and sometthing while linux was booting said 'a device has been removed' and mentioned 'hdd' which is what I think the device whould be called. It then asks if I want to run the config tool which I do and it says 'Choose a partition' and lists my partitions, not including the one on the disc which has been unplugged. So I don't want to do anything with these partitions so I cancel.

Plug it back in and reboot and it detects hdd has been added, again the config tool gives me a list of partitions which does not include any on hdd so I don't want to choose any of these.

I added the line to fstab as well, with hdd1 for partition 1 (there is only one partition) on my hd on the slave of the second ide. Nothing happens on reboot. In fstab my other partitions are labelled hdda1, hda2 etc for the partitions on the IDE0 Master hd. The cdrom which is master on the second IDE is labelled hdc.

chombee.............

Any luck so far with this issue?

It's driving me nuts too.....I've a 1GB Harddrive sitting slave on IDE 2 formatted FAT32 which I use as a file repository for files I don't want to loose during a fresh install of a new OS. Never had a problem with Mandrake before, from 8.0 up to 9.2. All of the past distro's mounted that drive properly and let me use it extensively, however, with 10.0 Community, Mandrake refuses to play nice.

Anyways, hopefully you've had some luck with this, I'm dying to get onto this drive and access the files within, hopefully without having to re-install XP to do such. Any luck you have, please let me know.

Thanks,
Rob.