OK... So I decided to rename some of the devices in my /etc/fstab file. I don't like the names that the Mandrake installer picked for me. For example, my removable thumb drive ended up as /mnt/win_c3. So I made a directory in mnt called thumb, and renamed the mount point in fstab....

Anyway, while I was in there, I found an entry, and I can't for the life of me figure out what it is. I'll paste the entry, then describe my setup:

none /mnt/hd supermount dev=/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,kudzu,codepage=850 0 0

Now, here's what I have on this system:

2 hard drives.

Primary drive - one partition, fat32 with a dysfunctional and soon to be deleted WinXP on it.

Secondary drive - Linux, with a swap partition, a / root partition, a /home partition (root and home are reiserfs), and a /data partition (fat32 for common data storage).

All of the partitions on the secondary drive already have mount points in fstab, and the partition on the primary drive has a mount point assigned as well (it mounts as /mnt/win_c).

So what the heck is that /dev/hd ??? I don't have any other partitions!

Can I delete it?? I'd like to get rid of the icon off my desktop at least. And, when I right-click the icon on the KDE desktop, there is no "unmount" option like the other vfat drives.

Thanks all!

Don't delete it, just add a "#" in front of it, commenting it out, then see what happens. That way, if it messes something up, just take out the # and it's back

Oooh good plan - I was wondering if that file supported comments

Do most LInux config files allow you to comment lines out? (And is it safe to assume the pound sign as the single-line comment character?)

Yes, # is usually the comment character.As always, there are exceptions. You can typically figure it out by scanning the existing file. Most distributions or software packages will have comments in a stock/default configuration file.

If I'm reading things correctly, that line in fstab is referring to your XP partition. If you dissect the dev= portion of the line, it's saying:
/dev/ide - IDE device
/host0 - connected physically to this machine
/bus0 - primary IDE channel
/target0 - master on the IDE channel
/lun0 - internal characteristic of the device; storage devices usually just have 1 lun
/part1 - partition 1

I'm not completely familiar with supermount, but my (limited) experience with it suggests it mounts disks/devices on-demand. So if you were to make a request to read or write something supermount knows is on your XP drive, it would try to mount it for you, perform the operation, and then unmount it when complete; sort of a way to hide the need to mount filesystems from the user.

So yeah, comment out the line first and see if it changes anything. If not, you could delete it if you like.

if you were to delete that ICON from the desktop AND it was a mounted
partition.............everything on that partition would
go bye bye!!(IE.....deleted, gone)!!
the saying goes........IF in doubt, comment it out...........

Looks like comments are the way to go - thanks all

Yep, commenting is better than depending on your memory.