How do I configure DSL to automatically see and mount local partitions?
 

I have partitions that I normally use for Slack11. Whenever I use windows, I want to do some things on Linux so I tried using DSL(embedded). To my surprise when I issued df -h command, it only shows the filesystem created by DSL. Therefore, I can't manually/automatically mount those partitions. How do I do approach this? Do i have to make custom configuration on /etc/fstab? Thanks in advance.

First, the df command only shows the partitions that are currently mounted. If you want to see all hard disk partitions (mounted or not) that DSL can see, use (as root):

fdisk -l

(the parameter is the letter "el", not the numeral "one")

I have never worked with DSL embedded, so I don't know if it has the ability to seel the real hard drive partitions or not. But if it does, you should be able to mount them manually with the mount command. For example:

mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/hda3

would mount /dev/hda3 on mount point /mnt/hda3. The command must be run as root (or using sudo) and the mount point must already exist.

Alternatively, you can, as root edit your etc/fstab file.

that command doesn't work if you run DSL on a usb stick becuase it doesn't see the NTFS drives at all in the first place.

I have this problem too and not found a solution to it yet. And for me its a bit of a deal breaker becuase the main purpose for me trying DSL in the first place is so i can boot to it and recover peoples data either by copying it to the usb stick itself or over the network to a share on another pc. Therefore automounting ntfs is pretty fundamental which is why its surprising it doesn't do this out of the box.

I'd certainly consider this feature far more important than most of the other apps etc it has like pdf viewer etc etc.

Are you actually booting from the usb stick or are you running it from within MS Windows by executing dsl-windows.bat? I just tried reading NTFS from a DSL 2.4 CD on a NTFS partition created with GParted (I don't have the ability to create a "real Windows partition.") and it worked fine. If you are actually booting from the usb drive, I would expect it to work the same as a CD. If you are launching this from within MS Windows as I believe the OP is doing, then I am not totally surprised that you can't see the real hard drive partitions (although I have not tried it myself).

No matter how you boot or from what medium, DSL will not automount any hard drive partitions. You have to do that yourself, either using the GUI tool in the lower right hand corner (on the versions I've seen) or via the command line. And on the version of DSL I have (2.4), it will refuse to mount NTFS read-write. But you can still copy files from the NTFS partition.

ah it seems you were right. I was using qemu before to test it within windows xp. But if i boot straight to the stick it does see the NTFS drives. I think it set the ntfs drive as hdb1 and the flash drive as sda1, somthing like that.

So i used the explorer type program and got a directory on the flash drive on the right and the ntfs drive on the left.

so i try and make a directory on the usb stick so i could copy over some data form the ntfs drive. Now it says permission denied! So what do i need to do to sort that out?

I've never run from flash so I am not totally sure. If you're at all comfortable with the command line, use the mount command (w/o parameters) and see if the flash drive is mounted rw. If not, try the command

If it is already mounted rw, see if you can create a directory from the command line something like:

(assuming /mnt/sda1 is where /dev/sda1 is mounted -- that's how they did it in older versions of DSL) If that fails, take a look at the ownership and permissions of /mnt/sda1 with

hey thanks for the reply, but the answer was fairly simple. I just logged in to a shell as 'sudo su' then ran emelfm from there. So i had root access and could copy files so that worked well.

I have had some problems with the saving settings thing too but i guess i should make another thread :p

Thanks for the help.