Ok, well I have not gotten WineX or Wine to install the games I play so I decided to reinstall XP just for games... well I like music as some can tell from my recent posts and was wondering what would be the best way to make a drive to store my media on that I can share between linux and XP... I relize it either has to be FAT or NTFS from my understanding or Wndows will not pick it up... but at the same time I want Linux to beable to write to it... along with that is there a way I can mount that drive (hdb2) on boot... thank you in advanced

Linux can read and write fat32 and NTFS. THe correct modules must be in the kernel in order for it to work. I don't know Slack 9.1, I'm sure someone can tell you if the support is part of the kernel or if you have to insmod it. As far as I know, most up to date kernels will read and write Fat32. I didn't have to do anything special on Mandrake 9.1 or 9.2. To mount at boot time, all I did was add the following lines to etc/fstab.

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=000 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=000 0 0

You will have to edit what I have posted for drive, partition, and name. Hope this helps.

Whoa! Careful; Linux is fine with read/write on FAT32, but as for NTFS, the writing is seriously dodgy - classed as experimental ain't it?

Stick with a FAT32 partition and it should do the job, mount on boot as described above I believe :)

Steve

Yeah .. NTFS read / write support is far from usable.. and it will probably take a loong time before its acceptable

bash-2.05b# mount /dev/hdb2 -t fat32 /mnt/hd
mount: fs type fat32 not supported by kernel

How can I get the kernel to beable to mount the fat32fs. I checked for kernel patches but I have never patched a kernel and really have no clue what I am doing :-/

Could you try

mount /dev/hdb2 -t vfat /mnt/hd

Steve

P.S. (Or am I waaay off?)

No SBing I think you are right :-)
From man mount

-t vfstype
The argument following the -t is used to indicate
the file system type. The file system types which
are currently supported are: adfs, affs, autofs,
coda, coherent, cramfs, devpts, efs, ext, ext2,
ext3, hfs, hpfs, iso9660, jfs, minix, msdos, ncpfs,
nfs, ntfs, proc, qnx4, ramfs, reiserfs, romfs,
smbfs, sysv, tmpfs, udf, ufs, umsdos, usbfs, vfat,
xenix, xfs, xiafs. Note that coherent, sysv and
xenix are equivalent and that xenix and coherent
will be removed at some point in the future -- use
sysv instead. Since kernel version 2.1.21 the types
ext and xiafs do not exist anymore. Earlier, usbfs
was known as usbdevfs.

bash-2.05b# mount -t vfat /dev/hdb2 /mnt/hd
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb2,
or too many mounted file systems

That's scary! Cheers for confirming :)
May seem like a silly question, but are you sure hdb2 is an FAT32 partition and not an NTFS partition? - Can I suggest (if it doesn't have any data on) that you format it in linux?
Then it has to mount :)

Steve

as root run fdisk -l /dev/hdb and post here

I assume you have /mnt/hd created already.

bash-2.05b# fdisk -l /dev/hdb

Disk /dev/hdb: 185.2 GB, 185283624960 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 22526 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 9726 78124063+ 83 Linux
/dev/hdb2 9727 22526 102816000 b W95 FAT32
bash-2.05b#

Did you compile your kernel or something?
Whatever you have there, try to downlad the 2.6.7 and, tell it to have the support for vfat,ntfs e.t.c (whatever you want). The 2.6.X kernels are compiled easily in comparison to 2.4.25 where even the official source package for kernel that is shipped with slackware, didn't compile neatly. I had to change many things before I could load the cusomized kernel.
I believe that's your only problem.

i had a similar problem about how to mount an ntfs partition under linux. by googling i found a kernel module (kernel-ntfs) which was coming as an rpm package. so there was no need for recompiling my kernel. maybe you want to google id there is smth similar for fat32 suppport. and yes ntfs is only mounted in read mode in my system.

I finally got it working :-P no problems now just did mkdosfs (or whtaever the command is) then -F 32 /dev/hdb2 and it worked