Hello everybody !

Recently I am trying to make a considerable effort to change to linux. I am complete newbie to linux and recently sucessfully installed red hat 9.0 and winxp dual boot but have run into quite a few problems...

This is a brief overview of what I did, created 10GB partition in bios and installed winxp(ntfs) on it, then from xp created a FAT32 (5GB) partition and another 5GB(NTFS) partition. Then I booted from red hat CD and installed red hat on remaining 8.6GB. It works fine... but here are the problems I face......


Problem 1 : I cannot see the FAT32 5GB partition from my linux OS, but I can see it from winxp, can anyone help me on this ???

Problem 2: I have a LAN based internet connection which requires me to log on using a ISP client giving my username and password. The first time I looged on winxp I ran this client and was able to log on, I forgot to log out and restarted my computer and started linux and entered all the information in the network card like IP, DNS, gateway.

SURPRISINGLY It didn't even ask me to download the client and I was able to go online just by giving this information. PROBLEM: NOW I CANNOT GO ONLINE ON WinXP.....?????
I tried to do everything deactivate the card on linux and trying to log on in winxp. I am able to log on in XP but I cannot go online ......... internet expllorer just gives up it doesn't even try connect to the website......

Problem 3: I was trying to install the the internet client on linux as well, the instruction say to type this command ./install.sh from root mode, how to I log on to root mode, I have entered the root password and then tried this but the terminal tells me that I should be in root mode to run this

PLEASE HELP !!!!!!!

Welcome to the world of Linux,

becoming root is easy...at terminal type

$ su -
and your root password and you'll be root. Make sure that changes you make as root are permanent and you could damage your system if you delete or alter files as root. Root should be used for maintenance and admin functions.


You would have to mount the FAT32 partition to be able to see it and read/write from/to it. You can do two things.

1. You can mount manually everytime you login into Linux or
2. Have linux take care of it automatically at boot. i.e. automount

manually mounting could be done this way

mount -t vfat -o rw /dev/hdXY /your_choice_of_mount_point

here's how i mount manually, mount -t vfat -o rw /dev/hda2 /mnt/docs

Auto mounting could be done with a "fstab" file in /etc directory

here's how i auto mount, /dev/hda2 /mnt/docs vfat auto,users,rw,umask=000 0 0

You would have to replace XY in /dev/hdXY with device and partition number...

to get device and partition number become root and do,


Your linux setting have nothing to do with WinXP.

For dial up questions, other LQers would answer as i've never used dial up on linux...i'm a high-speed tux

solved problems 1 and 3 thanks a lot Problem 2 still there.....

PLEASE HELP on problem 2 I don't know what the hell is going on ..............

I am looged on in the internet client in WinXP but when I start IE it doesn't even try to connect and in one second it fails.............

In XP try "ipconfig /renew all"

On second thought, this might not help. I'm thinking more about dhcp and high-speed cablemodems.

What program is used to log into the internet on Wndows XP. Perhaps if you ran this program from the cmd shell, you might get a message about what the problem was. Also check the windows logs. There may an application alert.

Also read through the linux script that you ran. Perhaps it did something like change the password. I am surprised that the MAC address of your interface isn't what is used.

Check that you didn't restrict access with a firewall.

Also, if you are accessing the internet through a proxy server ( It sounds like you are ), then gather the proxy information from linux and enter it into the internet explorer setup when you are in XP. This may be doing manually what the program did automatically.

Thanks a lot for all the info jschiwal !!!!!!!!!!

The client runs absolutely fine I am able to log on using the client enter my username and password and everything, the problems is that even after logging on the client, when I open IE it doesn't even try to open the website and just fails ...........

This is driving me really crazy, I though XP has nothing to do with linux then why this......... aaaahhhhhhhh...

Please help !!!!!

sorry for the double post but just more info

The client gives a static IP, mask, gateway and DNS.......