How to see additional hard drive under Mandrake
 

Can someone tell me how to save a file to a different drive from a Mandrake KDE environment. I am not familiar with how to see the additional drive (F:) which is FAT formatted and accessible (hopefully) by both Windows and Linux on my dual booted machine.

I'm just learning UNIX and Linux.

With a FAT formatted drive it should be simple (NTFS gets a little kinky). You need to navigate to /mnt/windows*

*windows is what mandrake 9.1 called my XP partition so I am assuming it is the same for you.

If for some reason it did not mount your other drive by default you can mount it pretty simply from the Mandrake Control Center. Click Mount Points and then DiskDrake. It is all pretty intuitive from there.

NOTE: If your security setting are set to Higher or Paranoid it might require you to use root to get to the /mnt directory. Once there you should be able to edit the permissions.

You need to create a mount point, then mount the drive. Assuming your Fat partition is the first partition on your second drive you would do something like:

mkdir /DOS
mount /dev/hdb0 /DOS

If your system can not figure out the type of filesystem automatically, your mount command would be:

mount -t vfat /dev/hdb0 /DOS

The key thing for you to understand is that Linux does not use drive letters to access drives. Instead it uses device files - e.g., the /dev/hdb0 thingy.

You can add a line to the /etc/fstab file so regular users & KDE can mount:
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/windows vfat user,umask=0,auto 0 0
'user' lets regular users mount, 'umask' sets permissions because you can't do it the regular way on win drives, 'auto' mounts automatically on startup. Add the line with any text editor. Note that Mandrake might have already put the needed line there, so you can just go to the folder where it is to be mounted (if the line is like the example I gave, that folder would be /mnt/windows).