How to mount a special label of my external hard drive?

faezeh · 03-18-2005, 11:41 PM

Hello,
I have bougth an external hard drive(MAXTOR),I have made three partitions on it using windows :
1.primary(NTFS)(label:New Volume)
2.extended,logical(FAT32)(label:FIRST)
3.extended(unallocated)
I want to mount the second patition in linux,but since the format of the first partition is NTFS,it gives me the errror message UNKNOWN FILE SYSTEM TYPE,how can I ask the system to mount the second partition using its label?

Thoreau · 03-19-2005, 12:21 AM

Not enough detail. Where exactly is it plugged in? What connector of what IDE chain, or is it usb?

faezeh · 03-19-2005, 01:14 AM

it is connected via usb and as far as I know you need to mount it by typing:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/hdd

Thoreau · 03-19-2005, 01:44 AM

If you are mounting the 2nd partition, then it's not sda1. It's sda2.

And for future refernce, NTFS is Microsoft copyrighted. You can mount it, but you can't write to it without screwing it up or using pirated windows libraries. FAT32 is an open filesystem, and you can read or write to it. Use vfat aka FAT32 when formating drives that you want linux to be able to use. Better yet, use reiserfs if it's a linux only drive.

faezeh · 03-19-2005, 03:38 AM

I tried /dev/sda2 but it gives me the error "/dev/sda2 is not a valid block device".

Robert G. Hays · 03-19-2005, 02:58 PM

I think the problem is that it is not /dev/sda2, it should be /dev/sda5.

You specified that it is in an extended partition, and for every distro that I know, though I could have missed some, the first LOGICAL partition is named /dev/???5, the second LOGICAL is '6, etc; 1 through 4 are only for PRIMARY partitions (bootable or not). The extended partition itself *will* use one of these four. Partitions inside an extended partition are technically known as logical partitions.

Thus your command *should* be:
mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/hdd

Hope that fixes it.

Also, well-written starting message!

faezeh · 03-21-2005, 04:22 AM

Thanks.It helped a lot.