if it's mounted it *will* show up in mount and df.

unix is case sensitive though, and your VG's are called VolGroup01, not volgroup01 etc.

even though my notes indicate i had mounted all the directories, i decided to do the mounts again, and now i see the lost&found directories under each of the mounts, and it wasn't there before...

i would have thought that that any directories that were added prior to doing the mount would have been lost after the mount, and yet
i had a /u02/oradata directory before issuing the mount statement, and i still have the same directory after the mount statement.
i would have thought the original /u02 was part of the root structure and once it was mounted on the VolGroupe01 it would no longer be accessible ? It's almost as if it was copied .. ???

if you mount a filesystem at a location, anything on that location will be unavailable whilst it is mounted, but will be available again once it is unmounted.

Mate ... your fstab won't mount those volumes on boot because the mountoption
is defaults, not default.

when dealing with 5 new linux servers, and linux not being my native tongue, i appreciate all the help i can get..