I can't get my secondary hard drive to mount at all,

I use this command

mount -t ntfs -o r /dev/hdb1 /windows/C

And get this error

mount: special device /dev/hdb1 does not exist

I know for sure that is the address for the device.
Here are the results from /sbin/fdisk

Disk /dev/hda: 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/hda1 * 1 11219 90116586 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2 11220 11350 1052257+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda3 11351 22525 89763187+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/hdb: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 4869 39110211 7 HPFS/NTFS

Any ideas?

Try: mount -t ntfs -o ro /dev/hdb1 /windows/C
or mount -t ntfs -r /dev/hdb1 /windows/C

I guess the option 'r' should mean read-only, which is '-o ro' or '-r'

Hi,

Thanks for the reply,

I still am getting the no such device error.

Any other ideas?

THanks,
Tony

Maybe you don't have NTFS support enabled in the kernel, or you didn't load the kernel module...

Do you have other NTFS partition that does mount?

No,

This is the only drive i'm trying to mount that is NTFS. And it wasn't there when I installed the Suse 9.2 on Thursday so that sounds like my problem.

Any quick & easy way to tell if my kernel has support and add support if it doesn't?

Thanks for posting!
Tony

Sorry, I cannot help you with that. The only thing that comes to my mind is to try (notice that this is as root)

I would expect that a distribution like SuSE had NTFS support, if not built into the kernel, at least as a module, so that should enable the NTFS support.

It found this module installed

/lib/modules/2.6.8-24-smp/kernel/fs/ntfs/ntfs.ko

So it must not be that,

I think I'll just come back to this later, it's taking up too much of my time.

I appreciate the tips. Every little bit helps,

Tony

But one thing is that you have the module and another is that it is loaded: that's precisely the idea behind using modules, to leave some things optional, out of the kernel.

"lsmod" will show you the modules currently loaded by your system. Does it appear when you run it?

I think this goes into the wrong direction. I would suspect a hardware problem rather than a problem with the ntfs module. This module will not appear in lsmod as long as mounting isn't successful. But loading the ntfs module shouldn't be a problem on a standard SuSE installation.

Strange is that the mount command refers to this device as 'special device', which I find rather ususual for a normal HDD. Do you get any information from dmesg (e.g. dmesg | grep hdb ).

Maybe you could try to mount /dev/hdb (instead of /dev/hdb1). This worked with some USB devices that did not show a valid partition table.

Hi abisko00,

How's the weather over there?

Thanks for the reply,

I had hoped hdb would work too but I get

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb,
or too many mounted file systems

I had everything working just fine after Suse 9.2 installed. It had read the D drive, and the C partition. This happend when I shutdown, disconnected the Suse/C drive, and installed a new XP installation on the D drive. When I connected the Suse drive back up, grub was back in control of everything so I went into Suse and got to where I am now.

The only change is the file system on D right?

Is there anyway to change the filesystem back to Fat32 and still have XP work on that drive? I'd rather do that because at the time I didn't know NTFS was only partially supported by linux.

I know XP runs on FAT32 because My C drive used to be FAT32 becuase I upgraded from windows 98 to XP and it left the filesystem the alone.

Thanks,
Tony

Hej Perl21,

it's a little snowy right now, but I plan to got for a ski trip soon, so I won't complain

Sure you could run XP on FAT32, however I don't know if there is a back-conversion tool available and using FAT32 is like driving a 200 horsepower car with 50 mph all the time (Ooops, that's what you do in the states, right ) Sorry for the little joke!

I am not sure if you really gain something by another conversion. I suspect that something strange happend with the partition table after the first conversion. Neither NTFS nor FAT32 have ever created problems on SUSE. Partial support means that you won't be able to write on NTFS without special tools, but I would always prefer to have a data-exchange partition which is FAT32 formated and keep the OS's separated.

But back to the problem: have you tried to check dmesg for errors? What happens if you mount the drive through fstab at boottime (instead the manual mount command)? You could also try to see how the YaST partitioner recognises the drive.

Yeah but we get up to 50mph really fast.

I'm thinking of changing the NTFS system to FAT32 using the partition utility.

I need FAT32 so I can change some system files on my d drive to get my registry back to the way it was.

I never knew about dmesg, thanks for that great tip.

I found this

Probing IDE interface ide0...
hda: IC35L180AVV207-1, ATA DISK drive
hdb: SAMSUNG SP4002H, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
Probing IDE interface ide1...
hdc: TDK DVDRW840G, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: LTN526D, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
Probing IDE interface ide2...
ide2: Wait for ready failed before probe !
Probing IDE interface ide3...
ide3: Wait for ready failed before probe !
Probing IDE interface ide4...
ide4: Wait for ready failed before probe !
Probing IDE interface ide5...
ide5: Wait for ready failed before probe !
hda: max request size: 1024KiB
hda: 361882080 sectors (185283 MB) w/7965KiB Cache, CHS=22526/255/63, UDMA(100)
hda: cache flushes supported
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3
hdb: max request size: 128KiB
hdb: 78242976 sectors (40060 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(100)
hdb: cache flushes supported
hdb: hdb1

Not sure if those warnings are the problem or not,

The Yast Partitioner recognises the drive as an NTFS drive so I assumed it should mount. And I've tried mounting with fstab too. I just got tired of restarting to test changes. I last tested using Fstab though so I know my last changes had not effect on either method.

Thanks,
Tony

I don't think the warning mean anything. The system is just checking if you attached some devices to the other ide controllers, which is not the case.

hdb has also been recognised correctly, so I really don't see why it does not work, sorry!

Hope you have more luck with FAT32.

Thanks for all the help abisko00!

you are trying to mount device /dev/hdb1.
but does the file /dev/hdb1 exist ?

just because dmesg mentions hdb1, does not mean that the device file exists.

do :

cd /dev
ls -l hdb*

what is the output ?

also show us the output of
cat /proc/partitions

also, in dmesg, are other hdb partitions mentionned ? like hdb2, hdb3...