mounting fat32

alright, I have a bunch of iso's on a fat partition

how can I mount a fat32 partition it's a second hard drive, so I think it's hdb. I've tried:

"mount hdb" and "mount hdb1"

I'm not sure if it's the bash syntax I've got wrong or I dont' have a package installed to read a fat partition

this is RedHat 7.1, and it's just a basic install

thanx

nate

first run this and see the name of it

fdisk -l

then create a place to mount the partition

mkdir /mnt/fat32

then mount it

mount /dev/hdb? /mnt/fat32

first off, that worked-- but part of it did, so read on if you've got time

I couldn't get fdisk to work for some reason, so I just made a partition and mounted hdb, I might have tried hdb1 too, I dont' remember

either way it worked, I'm not sure if I got the syntax wrong on fdisk, but that might be something I'd need to use in the future--

I dont' know it just kept saying that it couldn't find the command. I coudl get a man page explaining it but it wouldn't recognize fdisk.

oh well, I'm gonna check the consistancy of the my rh8 iso's now,

thank you

Hey David, sound familiar

Snow, you have to be root to run fdisk, just an fyi

Cool

yep, it seems like there's a lot of that these days.

snow try this before you use fdisk

su -

I'll try it again after I've had a few hours sleep, but I'm pretty sure I was root. it wouldn't let me mount hdb1 to /mnt/fat32 unless I was.

oh well... <shrugs>

nope, doesn't work under root.

<shrugs and rolls into bed>

that's the second problem this week with no fdisk

Really strange.

It must be one of the install options that leaves it off.

The wierd thing is that it's 2 different version though David. This is 7.1, the other was RH 8.0 I would think it'd be almost an ultra base package, that just installing the "bare bones" would include fdisk.

Snow, look through your RPM's on your install discs and see if you can locate an RPM for fdisk and then install it. Easiest way I can think of is to be in the directory containing all the RPM's and then type:
find | grep fdisk
Then to install:
rpm -Ivh filename.rpm

There's probably something better than that, but I am stuck on using grep for everything

Cool

thanx, I'm gonna make sure I've got that on here when I put on 8.0. I don't know where RH puts that file-- if it's in /usr/bin or /bin, but I was doing something a couple weeks ago in win2k and I wiped the /boot partition that RH sets up-- I think it's a specialty partition or something because I haven't had any other problems-- except this. maybe it was in there? I dont know

what I do know is that I'm checking the md5sums and in 20 minutes I'll have install disc 2 and I can just wipe both of these installs...

thanx for your help.

btw, how many contributors do you guys have? I mean, David's replied to most of my posts in both hardware and software. hehe

maybe I'll learn a bit more and help you guys field the "dumb" questions-- dumb is so relative though. Oh well.

thanx again.

Nate

We stay pretty busy, just depends on who's on at the time.

I look at the posts with zero replies quite a bit, so if yours hit's the top ten it should get some response.

Hello!
My question is similar, so I'm posting it here instead of starting a new thread...hope that's okay.

I have two hard drives installed on my computer, one dedicated to Linux (RH 8.0) and the other to windows XP. The windows drive has two partitions on it: One with the operating system and another I want to use for files shared between the two OS's. I can mount the first partition (hdb1) just fine, but I can't seem to mount the other (hdb5). The one that doesn't work is an extended partition that I created with fdisk when I first formatted the drive and installed windows XP.

I get this error when I try to mount it:
[root@localhost shared]# mount -t vfat /dev/hdb5 /mnt/shared
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb5,
or too many mounted file systems

I'm pretty sure the type is right and that I didn't give it a wrong option. Not sure what bad superblock means, and I'm not sure how many is "too many" mounted file systems (I have about 6).

Running 'fdisk /dev/hdb' then 'p' gives me:
Disk /dev/hdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 4179 33567786 c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hdb2 4180 9729 44580375 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hdb5 4180 9729 44580343+ b Win95 FAT32

Any assistance you can give would be greatly appreciated. This has been frustrating me for quite a bit now

~Julie

So I am thinking it's already mounted. Try typing:
mount

This will display what is already mounted. If it is, you can umount it and then mount it wherever you desire. To make the changed permanent you'd have to edit your /etc/fstab to change the mount point.

Cool

Thanks for your reply, but that doesn't seem to be the problem. Executing 'mount' gives me:

/dev/hda2 on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
usbdevfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/hdb1 on /mnt/winXP type vfat (rw)

I'm wondering if something went awry in my partitioning. Is there a way to repartition without destroying the contents of the windows drive (without having to purchase software like Partition Magic)? or even better, any other suggestions on why the partition isn't mounting?

~Julie

Is it possible to copy the data to your C drive in windows and recreate the partition