I'm having mad probs with mounting, I've read all the man pages and the questions on this fourm, but have not solved my problem, I have worked on this all day now I come to the one place I hope to get a straight answer.


I have 3 hard drives hda1 is dual boot rh9/win2k no ntfs partitions.

my ftsab resembles this;

/dev/hdd1 fat32

/dev/hda1 fat32
/hda2 ext'd
/hda5 fat32
/hda6 Linux
/hda7 Linux
/hda8 Linux


/hdb1 fat32

I have tried all mount tips and instruction and nothing worked, out of all the fourms it seems that there must be a folder created before the mount takes place, the fstab file must be edited after it has been mounted temporarily, i'm wondering if this is true and what steps exactly do i need, to access these partitions.

sounds simple but for some reason it's not.

The easiest way I know of to create mountpoints for my other partitions is as follows:

for my Windows XP C: Drive I did this:
This will add the line to your fstab to mount your WindowsXP partition.

My setup is this:
You can do "df -T" to find out the filesystem types of all your mounted partitions.

I know this doesn't entirely answer your question but I hope it starts you in the right direction.

rberry88

is this mkdir supposed to make this in the home dir of user?
or in the dir of /dev?

When you do "mkdir /mnt/xxxxxxx" it will make the directory in /mnt

You can do it from anywhere because the /mnt tells your system to put it with the other mountpoints in the /mnt directory.

rberry88

It matters not where the folder made. Mounting a partition is just directing all the contents of it into a folder an another filesystem. So to mount the windows drive you could even make a directory in /home/username/windows and call it whatever you want. I'm surprised that after reading all that stuff that you didn't find out that you needed to mount the partition into a folder. I mean, where else would it mount?

Also, just to clear some things up about the whole "C:" drive deal, that's only an alias for the drive that the windows OS uses, Linux just mounts the root partition at /, whereas Windows mounts it at \ and sets the alias "C:" to it as well. There's a little crash course in why there's no such thing as a "C:" drive in the actual workings of a computer's hardware. Now I'll be quiet and show you how to mount in in case the last person's post confused you. lol

(as root)
mkdir /mnt/windows # Again, it doesn't matter what you call the folder. Just make sure that you make it in a good place with an appropriate name.
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/windows # If you made it in /home/username/windows, replace /mnt/windows with the directory name

In the real world of computing outside of stupid microsoft, drives are read as hd0,0 type things (by the BIOS), and then translated and mounted by the operating system you use. Linux happens to make it very easy and use only a simple /.

Pwnz3r is correct in that C: is only used by MS as a user-friendly way of drive naming. I guess I should have been a little more detailed in my explanation the first time.

In my example I have my WindowsXP (C:) drive on hdb1 and I made a mount point/file for it named windowsXP in the first line.

In the second line of *my* example I told the system to mount my WindowsXP (C:) drive which is /dev/hdb1 (by Linux standards) to the mount point I created at /mnt/windowsXP. Where you see "ntfs" in my command line you would just change that to whatever filesystem type you are mounting (e.g. ntfs, fat32, ext2, ext3, reiserfs etc). Then you will need to add the line to your fstab file so when you reboot you can view the files in the directory (windows) without having to remount it again.

fstab entry for above:
rberry88

"I'm surprised that after reading all that stuff that you didn't find out that you needed to mount the partition into a folder. I mean, where else would it mount?"


I see you read my post and read that i understand what a mount si and what a mount does oviously if i read the man pages. The problem that i'm learning is that instructions are vauge in man pages, my problem was if and in what order was i to do this correctly, as with in DOS it's written in plain english even other man pages explain go to this dir and mkdir not just make a dir anywhere being a newbie where does it say that when you are using these mount commands it automatically will make it in mnt dir, i guess its one of the problems with newbies, anyway i appreciate the advise and will follow the instructions given.

I've made the dir in /root/win2000 (which is of course home)

I've also tried these commands

mount /dev/hda1/root/win2000
/hda1/win2000
mount: can't find /dev/hda1/root/win2000 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

am I doing something wrong I understood you can test the mount w/o editing the files.

please help,

Leave a space between device and mountpoint:
mount /dev/hda1 /root/win2000

i did! I thought people would think that but check with your cusor.

Let me clarify:
The error message you posted shows that the two were stuck together when the command was run.

what a small yet simple mistake thankyou everyone especially the last post the error of my ways I am thankful. It has worked, I feel like such an idiot to have missed something so simple now I know that everything must be checked constantly and wording must be inspected.

I am that much closer to ditching microsoft,
My quest now continues,

Keep going, don't stop now. You will soon be free of the dark side and have visions of happy penguins jumping before you.

lol

rberry88