I installed RH9 and am having trouble mounting a WD 160gig dirve attached to a promise 100TX2 2.0.210.2 ATA controller card. The partition I am trying to mount is a FAT32.

I have formatted the drive twice and am still not able to mount the drive.

Input: mount -t vfat /dev/hde1 /mnt/backup
ERROR: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hde1,
or too many mounted file systems

Here is the output of fdisk -l:
Disk /dev/hde: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hde1 * 1 19457 156288321 c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)

Disk /dev/hdc: 40.0 GB, 40027029504 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4866 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 * 1 4866 39086113+ c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)

Disk /dev/hda: 8455 MB, 8455200768 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1027 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 14 979 7759395 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 980 1027 385560 82 Linux swap

I really have no idea why I can't mount the drive, I do however find the + in the blocks column suspicious (for /dev/hdc).

Any ideas?

Thanks in Advance.

try -t msdos
also make sure eather the vfat module is loaded into the kernel or compiled in. (lsmod)

I get the same error message when I try -t msdos.
I know that the FAT32 support is there b/c /dev/hdc is mountable and accessile and is FAT32.

Any other ideas?

version of fat32, windowsxp sometimes does a few minor things to its fs's that make them unusable, use a windows 98 floppy or linux to format it fat32, then do the windows part.

(mkfs.vfat /dev/hdx)

I tried mkfs.vfat /dev/hde and I get the following error:
mkfs.vfat 2.8 (28 Feb 2001)
mkfs.vfat: Attempting to create a too large file system

Anyone know what the limit on FAT32 partitions is or how to get around this?

What is ext3's limit?

not sure.