second hard drive
 

i have 3 hd's. the first, hda, has 2 winxp pro's on it and a fc1. i have a second hd that i don't use, and the third, hdd, has 2 partitions, one is a windows compatible partition, though i don't know what exactly it is, and the other is a ntfs. i use the fat32 to swap my crap between win and linux. prob is that windows died on me again so i had to reinstall and then the mbr went crazy and i had to reinstall linux to get it working again. now i am trying to edit /etc/fstab so that my fat32 partition will auto mount, but i don't know the exact name for the type of partition. 1 is there a way to find this; 2 how do i format the partition if i cant find the name of the partition type; 3 is there anything else i need to know when i edit /etc/fstab?

Not sure of your exact questions? Are you asking which partition ID is your FAT32 or what is it's filesystem type?

A FAT32 partition filesystem type is called vfat. Look at the man pages for the mount and fstab commands.

To see which partition log in as root and type in the following command:
fdisk -l

This will show the partitions for all drives.

You can find all of your answers by searching this website.

what i was looking for was what linux sees the partition as. i know windows calls it fat32, but when i formatted it last time windows didnt like that so i had to format it as something else and i couldnt remember what it was. normally i wouldnt care, but i needed that information to edit /etc/fstab

i have solved my problem now, thanks