Please bear with me in my ignorance; I've been in IT for almost 22 years but only recently have sunk my teeth into Linux. Now I remember what it was like just starting out....

While not germane to this I'll mention it anyway: I am using Fedora 2.0 Core as the O/S on an i386 platform. I have four IDE drives in the system. I know they are there because (1) I installed them; (2) I partitioned them with Druid, and (3) Hardware Browser shows them....BUT I CAN'T ACCESS THEM!

I've all this storage and for the life of me cannot figure out how to get to those other disks. The file system is EXT3.

The disk are as follows:

hda
hdb
hde
hdg

Can someone shed some light on this please? The disks were present at the time the O/S was installed...I don't even want to go anywhere near what's involved in adding another disk <grin>.

And if I may....

I can see the Swap File on hde3. Yet when transferring over mega-data with System Monitor up and running, the 1.5GB of pagefile is virtually untouched. (768MB RAM). Is this normal?

Thank you!

How is it you are trying to access them? Have you mounted the drives within the filesystem? What are the errors displayed if you have tried to mount them? If you weren't able to access one (or more of them), I would doubt you'd be able to boot at all.

As for the swap bit, well, swap is really only used when necessary when you run out of RAM. With 768 MB, I doubt you will run out very often. I have 1 GB of RAM on my main machine, and I never, ever see any swap space being used.

If you can boot into Linux, please post your file /etc/fstaqb.

Note: The drives, if partitioned, will be shown as /dev/hdaX, where X is a partition number.

What does "fdisk -l hda" return?

Also, you might try the command "df -h" to see if your system is finding the drives.

Welcome to LQ. I'll agree that it least at first glance it appears that the drives just aren't being mounted automatically, and thus cannot be accessed. (You cannot access a drive until it has been mounted). It would be useful to post the contents of the fstab file (in the /etc directory) as well as the output from running "fdisk -l" (no quotes, and that's a small "L" not a one) -- J.W.

Everyone - thanks for the excellent feedback. When I get home this evening I will post the content of the appropriate file(s) as asked.

Question though: if they are not mounted, why is it that the SWAP partition resides on one of the very disks I cannot access?

Nonetheless, it'd be best for me to post the contents of /etc/fstaqb and provide other such information as "fdisk -l hda".

Again thanks - it really is appreciated!

The swap partition is never actually mounted. There is an entry in /etc/fstab that locates where the partition is, and the system uses the partition without including it in the filesystem. The system treates it as raw storage.

Just to followup, the fstab file is: /etc/fstab There is no "q" in the name.

In anticipation of the next likely question, and at the risk of explaining something that you already know, the way to make the drive accessible is to mount it. The general format of the command is to mount a given partition to a specific mountpoint. Example:
where "x" is the partition letter, "y" is the partition number, and <mountpoint> is the directory name. Obviously, all these values will depend on the specifics of your machine, but if you wanted to mount the first partition of /dev/hde to a directory called "/backup1" then the command would be "mount /dev/hde1 /backup1" (Obviously the mountpoint must already exist). Please see the man pages for mount for additional detail. -- J.W.

Thanks again to everyone! I see no means of uploading fstab...am I overlooking something?

The drive sizes as provided by fdisk -l (below) are correct: dual 40GB, a single 20GB, a single 120GB.

(1) fdisk -l hda returns nothing. What should I be seeing?


Here is the requested output:

fdisk -l returns the following:

Disk /dev/hda: 41.1 GB, 41174138880 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 79780 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 204 79780 40106808 83 Linux

Disk /dev/hdb: 20.5 GB, 20576747520 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 39870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 204 39870 19992168 83 Linux

Disk /dev/hde: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 238216 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hde1 * 1 203 102280+ 83 Linux
/dev/hde2 204 235096 118386072 83 Linux
/dev/hde3 235097 238216 1572480 82 Linux swap

Disk /dev/hdg: 41.1 GB, 41174138880 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 79780 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdg1 * 1 79780 40209088+ 83 Linux


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I was told earlier today - as in this post - to remember that Linux sees these disks as a filesystem...but yet was still unable to, as an example, change to /tmp which is a partition on /dev/hda1.

Again, thank you! How can I get 'fstab' posted here?