mount my 300gig hd
 

hi there i just installed ubuntu linux this morning and im a total newbie so please help me. since then i have been reading various places in trying to understand the system
so far i learned a few things..but obivously not enough cause i still need to get my 300gig hdd to work under my name..

from what i understand there are 2 profiles, the root and of course my profile "seifer" the name in which i log under.. with those 2 profiles comes to different directorys.../root, and /home/seifer each have all different properties cause under root which i understand you enter by typing (and please correct me if im wrong) "gksudo nautilus"

the problem is...this drive shows up under computer as DRV2_VOL1 its my 300gig Hdd default its under the fat system so im safe. and with root i can enter it and see everything (pics, files) but under seifer i cant access it nor even view anything..when i try i get
"mount: according to mtab, dev/hdb1 is already mounted to /
mount failed"

under seifer there are a bunch of folders with icons of locks in yellow and "X" in red boxes from what i know i cant enter those but under /media is the DRV2_VOL1 folder with a red X box i cant enter that either.

sorry for making this long..i really wanna fix this cause i been at it all morning.

my fstab at the moment looks like this

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda5 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1

please help me what am i doing wrong....how can i get my HDD to show up and how can i access it..

hmmm that fstab looks weird to me, you're mounting 2 harddrives as / (root directory, think of a tree). Normally you have 1 harddrive as root, and you use hdb1 (or whatever) as /home (for example).. which means that all files but those written to /home (and underlying folders) are written to hda1. but in your case 2 hds (partitions) are being used as root.. unless you are using RAID (although i'm not familiar with RAID in linux).

the other things is the 2 users (root and seifer). your root user is to be compared with the "administrator" user in a windows server envirement. root controls about anything. your seifer user has only certain rights.. those rights are given to him by root (the administrator). So you could give seifer more rights (viewing/writing/executing -> try googling chmod). Or you could change from seifer to root (when you need something done needing more privilages) and back to seifer.

i know this isn't a direct solution to your problem, but i hope it makes your problem easier to understand?

can't help you much in "windows mode" as i only use command line (and webmin :d).

"its under the fat system so im safe."

Nothing in your fstab indicates that any hdb partitions are formatted as vfat. In fact it says its looking at ext3. You may need to include an entry for fstab manually as root. I mount a vfat drive with the following line in /etc/fstab
"/dev/hda5 /media/GRAHAM-D vfat, users,auto,umask=000"

The other issue will be permissions. That is, I make sure that as root, users can have read/write and execute permissions on anything on GRAHAM-D (in the above example)