I was trying to install open office 1.1 and I kept getting an error about not having symbolic something or other as I was forced to try to install on a drive that is not my root drive due to lack of space on my root drive. I guess this cant be done?

THanks

it can be done but the file system has to support certain features like symbolic links. So you cannot install it on a fat32 partition if it needs symbolic links (which it almost certainly does).

Please post the results of the following 2 commands:

df

mount

You probably may want to move the /usr or /opt tree to the new disk.
-- Beat

I will post the results of those commands when I am home later. Thanks for the responses.

I thought the drive was ext2 but I am not sure...guess not if I am getting that error.

What is the best all around format for a drive under linux?

you can use fat32 if you want,if you compile support for UMSDOS in the
kernel and get a few userspace utilities. it's alot slower than a normal
linux filesystem though.

To get utilities for initializing/checking UMSDOS file system, or
latest patches and/or information, visit the UMSDOS home page at
<http://www.voyager.hr/~mnalis/umsdos/>.

Here is my DF output

root@Linux:~# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb5 2623240 2343060 146924 95% /
/dev/hdd1 1245420 328 1245092 1% /mnt/hdd1
/dev/hda1 1951392 626752 1324640 33% /mnt/hda1
root@Linux:~#

and mount

root@Linux:~# mount
/dev/hdb5 on / type ext2 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/hdd1 on /mnt/hdd1 type vfat (ro)
/dev/hda1 on /mnt/hda1 type reiserfs (ro)


I see the problem already with hdd1 being vfat.

What is the easiest way to change that to ext2?

Why does FDISK show this if it is vfat?

Disk /dev/hdd: 1281 MB, 1281181696 bytes
64 heads, 63 sectors/track, 620 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 4032 * 512 = 2064384 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdd1 1 620 1249888+ 83 Linux




Thanks

I formatted the drive and changed it to ext2 but now when I try to mount it I get

Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdd1,
or too many mounted file systems

I checked fstab and it is shown as ext2 there....

my fdisk now looks like this

Disk /dev/hdd: 1281 MB, 1281181696 bytes
64 heads, 63 sectors/track, 620 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 4032 * 512 = 2064384 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdd1 1 620 1249888+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/hda: 2564 MB, 2564352000 bytes
128 heads, 63 sectors/track, 621 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8064 * 512 = 4128768 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 621 2503840+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/hdb: 3228 MB, 3228696576 bytes
128 heads, 63 sectors/track, 782 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8064 * 512 = 4128768 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1 121 487840+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hdb2 122 782 2665152 5 Extended
/dev/hdb5 * 122 782 2665120+ 83 Linux

Here is the line from FSTAB
/dev/hdd1 /mnt/hdd1 ext2 noauto,users,exec 0 0

you don't format a drive AND change it to ext2. however you format it
determines the filesystem, not what fdisk says. linux can ignore the fdisk
filesystem type definitions anyway. to format it ext2, you use mke2fs. for
reiserfs, it's mkreiserfs.

Sorry I was not clear....

I used mke2fs on hdd is what I ment to say...sorry if I don't know the best way to say what I did.

I was able to mount it using -f but I would imagine that is not the best way to do it.

i just thought it sounded like you might not be clear about what the filesystem
formatter does.

did you also notice that your hda1 -reiserfs was mounted read-only?
i expect you may want to be able to write to that.