I've installed Mandrakelinux 10.1 on an external hardrive, and it boots correclty to bash, but somehow whenever I try to make a directory in /home, I get this message:

mkdir: cannot create directory 'name' : No medium found

I know for sure that the /home partition exists, and that it is formatted (JFS ext3 format). Does anyone know how to fix this?

So, the /home partition exists, but has it been mounted properly?
Please post your /etc/fstab file and try a "mount -a" (as root) to mount everything automatically.

"/home" is not the name of a partition, but rather a directory.

Clarify: You are running Mandrake on an external drive, right? What do you mean when you say it "boots to bash"? Is it booting into terminal mode and not a GUI?
Can you type "cd /", and then "ls-l"....you should see a bunch of directories, including bin, boot, usr, var,.....and home.
type cd home, and then mkdir dirname. What happens?

here's the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda1 / ext3 noatime 0 0
none /home supermount dev=/dev/sda8,fs=ext2:vfat,--unmask=0,iochartset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0
/dev/hda2 /mnt/windows ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-1,ro 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda6 /usr ext3 noatime 0 0
/dev/sda7 /var ext3 noatime 0 0

I'm guessing that the "none" in front of home and the fact that somehow /etc/fstab lists /home as having the ext2:vfat file system are bad things?

When I paritioned the drive during the installation sequence, I made sure that the parition associated with /home was formated as JFS (ext3) and mounted...

Sorry, I meant the partition on which /home is kept.

That's what I meant. I booted Linux under runmode 2 to access the terminal. When I'm in the home directory, and type "mkdir folder," I get the error I mentioned above.

none in front of /proc is also not a good sign......

I do not know enough to understand all of this for /home---eg "supermount dev=/dev/hda8"

Can you do **anything** in /home? eg "touch filename" to create a new empty file. How about also posting the output of /etc/mtab?

There is enough weirdness here, that I would consider starting over---install with a much simpler structure--eg partitions for /boot , / , and swap

Actually, I got it working. I just rewrote the line to say "/dev/sda8 /home ext3 noatime 0 0," and linux recognized the partition! I guess the file wasn't properly written during installation...

I didn't create a partition on which to mount /proc. Should I?

No, I do not see anything wrong with /proc.

Supermount is a pseudo-filesystem that allows one to use removable media with out the need to manually mount and unmount. /home was being automatically unmounted but not being automatically mounted again when you attempted to access the device via the mkdir command. And so your problem was fixed when you removed supermount from the fstab entry.