Accessing FAT32 drives in RH9
 

Does anyone know if it is possible to access a FAT32 Windows drive in RH9 either from the terminal or (preferably) to create a mount point so I can just use it in X? Thanks.

easy:

mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows

this will then give you access at /mnt/windows. if this works you can then easily create a permanent entry in /etc/fstab

to mount a fat32 partition:

mount -t vfat /dev/hdXX /some/mount/point

of course you have to figure out where your partition is(eg. /dev/hda2) and actually create a directory for the mount point.

So basically it goes...

mount : Obvious really - to mount a file system
-t : Dunno, the command itself will probably explain all the switches
vfat : Meaning "virtual FAT" (something which overweight people would find bemusing :-p )
/dev/devicename/ : Where the device tag is actually located like /dev/cdrom/ being the first CD-ROM drive.
/mnt/whereever/ : To say where I want the filesystem to point to.

...right?

I'd been seeing mentions of /etc/fstab and I was guessing it meant "file system table". I'll take a look at that.

Cheers acid_kewpie and Demonbane!

IF you have vfat & msdos fs support in your kernel (built in or module):
assuming windows is on the first drive / first partition

code{

mkdir /mnt/windows

mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows

} /code

the -t flag is for filesystem type

if you don't have support in the kernel, it'll never fly

if it works, add the following line to /etc/fstab:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat defaults 0 0


then it will automagically mount every time you boot

Cheers
b

I have a question in reference to the to 0's at the end of the line, what are they for and I have seen other numbers on other lines like 1 2

clipped output from `man fstab`:



The sixth field, (fs_passno), is used by the fsck(8) program to determine the order in
which filesystem checks are done at reboot time. The root filesystem should be speci-
fied with a fs_passno of 1, and other filesystems should have a fs_passno of 2.
Filesystems within a drive will be checked sequentially, but filesystems on different
drives will be checked at the same time to utilize parallelism available in the hard-
ware. If the sixth field is not present or zero, a value of zero is returned and fsck
will assume that the filesystem does not need to be checked.


In other words, 0 0 means "do not run fsck on this drive"

Checking a vfat drive would probably make fsck barf all over your screen

Thanks very much.

Is this the same process with NTFS drives? Or is the command different?

since write support is limited on ntfs, I would use:

this is my setup, you will need to change `/dev/hda1` to point to your ntfs drive, and change `/root/xp` to point to your mount point.


so, assuming your ntfs drive is first partition, first drive(typically C:\) if you do:



you should see the contents of your C drive.


to automount at boot, add the following line to your /etc/fstab:

I have RH9 running, and have properly mounted my CD ROM and Floppy drives. But, I have created a single FAT32 partition on a 2nd hard drive which XP properly recognizes and uses as "D:"

When I use the above commands (as: mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1), I receive the error:
wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb1,
or too many mounted file systems

An attempt to mount the drive via fstab produces exactly the same message on boot.

Help! Any ideas?

TIA,
ZEPP

Is your drive really connected to 1st controller slave?
Make sure its really hdb1 and really FAT32
log in as root
fdisk -l /dev/hdb (that is a small L)

Did RH configure the drive for you? Check /etc/fstab for an entry and mount command to see if it is really mounted.

Fdisk returns:

[root@rdu57-241-252 root]# fdisk -l /dev/hdb

Disk /dev/hdb: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 9726 78124063+ c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)


Mount returns the error I cited above. I entered the line:
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 vfat ro,auto,nouser,async 0 0
directly to fstab, which produces the same error on boot.

argh.

Thanks for your help.
ZEPP

Well--solved the problem, thanks to a friend who stopped by last night.

The problem was really quite simple--this version of Linux does not support a FAT32 partition greater than 32 mb. As soon as we re-partioned the drive, everything works fine.

Cheers,
ZEPP