I have two hard disks. One is 10gb (ibm)and and other is 15gb (wester digital). I have installed fedora core 3 on both of my hard drives but for some unknow reason I can't boot from my 2nd hard drive. I thing the boot loader has the problem. Anyway my question is how do i access my 2nd hard drive? My first hard drive works fine but I want to acces my 2nd hard drive so that I can back up my jpeg, and other doucments and reformat the 2nd hard drive.

You should be able to access the second hard drive in the same way as the first, by setting up mount points in /etc/fstab.

Various install/configure utilities will do this for you, but you can equally do it yourself. http://www.tldp.org/LDP/sag/html/x13...unt-and-umount is a good place to start reading.

If you have an IDE disk, then you probably want to use hdb, hdc or hdd instead of hda.

From the sounds of it, your second hard disk isn't being mounted, so punch the following into your favourite terminal:

You should then be able to see the drive.

Thank you for your reply. I have mounted the hdb, but i don't see any of my files on the drive. Can you please provide more details. I''m a new to linux. Thank you.

Please post the command you use to mount it, so we can see what you are actually doing.

It sounds like you are probably mounting the wrong partition on the disk. You probably want the partition that corresponds to your old /home directory. Without knowing what files you can see, I can't guess at what you might have mounted, except it could be / or /boot if you chose the first partition.

This will list the different partitions on your system:
You probably want to mount something like /dev/hdb2, /dev/hdb5, or something like that. Try each one and see what you get

when i type in this command: su -c '/sbin/fdisk -l' , I get the following:
[root@localhost utpanchal]# su -c '/sbin/fdisk -l'

Disk /dev/hda: 10.1 GB, 10141286400 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1232 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 14 1232 9791617+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/hdb: 15.3 GB, 15382241280 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hdb2 14 1870 14916352+ 8e Linux LVM
[root@localhost utpanchal]#
I like to access the files on /dev/hdb2, so i try to mount and I get this
[root@localhost utpanchal]# mount /dev/hdb2
mount: can't find /dev/hdb2 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab
[root@localhost utpanchal]#

use this


mkdir /mnt/hdb2

mount /dev/hdb2 /mnt/hdb2

the not found in fstab means is just telling you
that mount doesn't know where you want to
mount the drive.