Hi,

Ive been a semi tech head for years, and know PCs and Macs inside out, but I now have decided to get into a proper OS...linux!

This morning I installed a spare 4GB HD, and installed REDHAT 9 and all works great....to be honest its shit hot considering its free!

Anyway...the questions begin..

1. How can I change the name on the OS loader from saying "DOS" to "Windows XP", OR how can I use the Windows XP boot loader

nb:/ Windows XP is installed on my other HD

2. I have read about how to mount my other HD, but when I run the mount command I get the error "mount : only root can do that"

So.. I have tried logging on as root using the login command, and "root" as the username with my root password as the password, but I get a wrong username/password error.

But I know that the password is correct, because when gnome asks for it for certain things it works

Please help!!

thanks

will

Ok...

1) Windows doesn't have a boot loader as such. If you install windows after Linux for example, you cannot get back into Linux without a boot floppy. Why? Cause Windows wants to take over your PC ;O)

2) Type su in a terminal (Super-User, a synonym for root) and then enter your password. You can do this from under any user. Try not to use root unless you have to.

3) To change the boot loader text it really depends on what boot loader you are using. If it's LILO, you'll need to edit lilo.conf, if it's GRUB, you'll need to edit menu.lst. For info on these, check the man pages :O)

4) Finally, I'm not sure why you want to mount, but a word of advice. In general anything you want to do in linux can be done with a nice gui - but where's the fun in that! Go over the man pages thoroughly, edit configuration files by hand, and you'll have a true understand of how things really work.

Windows? Bah humbug! :O)

Hey, to become "root" open up the "terminal" and type in "su" then your password.

1. Open the terminal type "su" <password> then gedit /boot/grub/grub.conf and find the word "DOS" (or whaterver)

2. to mount, open the terminal and become root. then "mount /dev/hd* (whatever HDD it is) /mnt/windows" if you using Gnome just right click on the desktop then "disks" and your hdd should be there. If you have Windows 2000/XP then you need NTFS support, someone here can tell you how mount it.

you may also want to look into apt

xquizit

Hi Rioch,

many thanks for your reply!

I want to mount the Windows HD (as its a seperate physical device) so that I can see all of my other files, is there a better way to do this?

Also...when I ran the command "mount -t vfat /dev/hda /mnt/Win_XP" I got the error back "Wrong FS type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda, or too many mounted file systems"

I find this weird as the hard disk is definatley a fat 32 system

any ideas?

thanks

will

Just ran the command fdisk to try and see what file system is on the hd1 , but get a command not found error, even when im in the /sbin/ directory...any ideas?!

That mount command won't work because /dev/hda is the label for the hard drive, not a partition on the hard drive. If it's just one big partition, or Windows XP is on the first partition then use /dev/hda1 instead. Otherwise use /dev/hdax where x is the number of the partition which XP is on

edit: For your fdisk problem, you will either need /sbin in your PATH variable (which it should be for root) or you need to go into /sbin and use "./fdisk" to tell it it's in the current directory. To add it to your PATH, edit /root/.bash_profile, find the line which says something like "PATH=....." and add ":/sbin" to it. If it's not there, then add the line "PATH=$PATH:/sbin" to the end of the file, followed by "export PATH"

Hope this helps
Guy