Hey all,

OK, I have a small PCMCIA->flash media converter. Pop my 96 meg disc in it, put it in my laptop, boot into Linux. dmesg says it's there, defines it as /dev/hde, with the partition on /dev/hde1 (bear with me if my terms are off). I bring up fstab, and edit in:

/dev/hde1 /mnt/flashcard vfat noauto,owner,users,exec 0 0

(never mind if the extra params are wrong, i'd find those out later and iron them out. i just want it working for now.)


then I go into console and type:

touch /flashcard


no output.
I then type:

mount -t vfat /dev/hde1 /flashcard

and it returns:

mount:mount point /flashcard is not a directory



what's up with this??

I luv easy ones like this one.
'touch /flashcard' is not the correct command in this instance. Touch creates a 'file', not a 'directory'.
so, you would want to create a directory (matched to your fstab), such as (see http://www.skyenet.net/~aross/Linux/.../command2.html for info)
First, 'rm /flashcard' to remove that incorrect file creation.
mkdir /mnt/flashcard
mount -t vfat /dev/hde1 /mnt/flashcard
cp /etc/fstab /mnt/flashcard
ls /mnt/flashcard/
cat /mnt/flashcard/fstab

If mount -t vfat doesn't work, try
mount -t msdos /dev/hde1 /mnt/flashcard


if all that works, you should be happy. If you want to change your file system on the flashcard, see if this link ( http://ldots.org/prodrive/ )might give you some ideas (for examples only, change device names to yours, backup any important files on the device to make sure you have fun, not trouble).
I hope this helps.

Ah, thank you. Works beautifully. Also, any idea what i'm thinking of with touch? I'm not sure where I picked that up from, and IIRC it came into play when I was getting my NTFS partition to read (which I had no problem with, mind you).

Nope, I just don't know. That one is beyond my ken. The deepest I've gotten, is to make a iso image file, create a /mnt/iso directory and mount it via loopbacks, and it looks like a readable harddrive. I use that to keep my MDK disc 1,2, and 3 always handy, along with my Network books. That way I don't have to always be slapping my CD's in and out of the box.
http://www.talcon.com/cdserver-howto/index.htm
and
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/CDServer-HOWTO/index.html
So, essentially, I have my own personal CDRom Tower in my house. Amazing what being lazy will force you to accomplish?