So I just installed Mandrake 9.1

Every time I attempt to access /mnt or a sub-directory of /mnt, everything freezes up. I can't even get out of X with "Ctrl-Alt-Backspace".

It happens whether I use a terminal, Nautilus or Konqueror.

I feel helpless and like a complete dumbass, but at the same time very angry. So, why me ?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Could you provide some more information?

1. What are the permissions for /mnt?
log in a root and use the command
ls -l /mnt
and post the output

2. Post the contents of your /etc/fstab

3. Are you using automount or do you click on an icon to mount a floppy or CD?

4. Are you trying to access something on /mnt without first mounting it?

1. I have no idea how to copy in Xterm, but doing "su" and then "ls -l /mnt" produces, roughly..

drwxrwxrwx 1 root root some-date cdrom/
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root some-date cdrom2/
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root some-date floppy/
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root some-date windows/


2.
/dev/hda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda7 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/cdrom2 supermount dev=/dev/hdd,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs iocharset=iso8859-1,ro,umask=0 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0


3. I guess I'm using automount. Mandrake install didn't ask me anything about that, but I have CD-ROM, etc. icons on my desktop.

4. Well, Linux crashed when I was trying to access /mnt alone, without trying to "delve deeper."

Thanks!

I am dealing with something that I know very little about, which is supermount on Mandrake. But given that my advice on the subject is highly suspect, here is my opinion.

Mandrake wrote their own version of automount which they call supermount and it has a history of being buggy. I would start investigating the problem by turning off supermount and seeing if the problem goes away. I don't have the man pages for Mandrake supermount so I can only guess at how to turn it off.

Log in as root and read:
man supermount
The supermount man pages probably say that the way to turn off supermount is the command:
supermount -i
or something similar.

Turn off supermount and see if the problem goes away. If it does then I made a lucky guess. If it does not then somebody who runs Mandrake will have to pick up your question and work with it.

In your next post could you give your Mandrake version number and your supermount version number. You can find the supermount version number (I think) by typing in:
rpm -qi supermount