Having been a win/dos user for a great many years I thought I do really need to get onto a very good OS seeing that win keeps crashing so I installed Redhat 6.0 and was surprised by the interface but I can't log onto my floppy with the Linux bootup disk from dos, my windows does not recognise my Linux partion and my Linux os does not seem to show a Cd-rom/Hard disk or Floppy disk are they all locked from what I have read from other postings, can someone help please.

By default you cannot access linux partitions from windows. I am not sure what you mean by Linux does not "see" your devices. There is nothing in Linux like My Computer that will show you all of your devices. Try putting a Linux formatted floppy in the drive and typing "mount /mnt/floppy" and then "cd /mnt/floppy". Do you see anything?

What commands did you use to gain access to those devices and what error messages did you get?

Where is your CDROM located on your IDE controller. Is it device #1 or #2 on IDE port #1 or IDE port #2?

You have access to the hard drive. Everything you're running is on the hard drive. I imagine you're looking for something like Drive C: drive D: and Drive A; for your hard drive, CDROM drive and floppy drive. However, in Linux it doesn't go like that. You have your lowest access on your system which is the root, "/". Everything else is builded upon the root. You would mount any device on the root and address it according to your assigned mount point.

It's posible your cdrom drive might already be mounted as /cdrom. Try typing "ls /cdrom" and see if you get a list of tiles.
For the floppy drive you can mount a disk with:

mount -f vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt

Then the files on your floppy disk will be accessible at that mounting point /mnt. This is providing you have a DOS disk in drive a and have the DOS filesystem support compiled into your kernel.

As far as accessing your Linux bootdisk, I believe it may have come in two parts. One is the boot disk, which will just load the OS. The other is the file system, which has files and programs for you to run or view. You can't mount the actually boot disk on Linux or DOS. There's nothing to run or view. It just loads your OS.

If you mount a floppy (or CDROM), which is, of course refered to as a removable disk, be sure to unmount it before you remove it. The IO data is in a cache and should be updated before removing the media. You may notice that after initially using your floppy, the data may appear to transfer just as fast as it does a hard drive. You may also notice that you might not see the floppy light go on and off when transfering data between your hard drive and floppy. But when you unmout it, you'll notice the light will go on and you'll here the floppy device being updated.

For more information on using the mount command look at the man pages with "man mount".

By the way, if you logged into your Linux system as root, you logged into your home area which is located at /root on your hard drive. If you create a new account this home area would be create on the hard drive (or the file system) at /home/[username] (with [username] being the name of the user account you created).

-- L. James