I have suse 10.0 on hdb1
i have windows xp on hda1
i have a large hard drive partitioned with fedora core 5 on hdd1 and vfat on hdd5

suse sees all hard drives including the vfat portion of the hdd, and is able to access all drives read and write except the vfat portion of hdd
fedora sees all hard drives except the vfat portion of the hdd, but is unable to access any hard drive but home drive.

i was told to disable hal, but do not know how
i changed the fedora fstab to look very similiar to suse fsab, but did not work.

help please

I'm sorry, but what is it you want to acheive?

You can disable hal in fedora via:
main menue > desktop > system settings > server settings > services

fedora manages it's own fstab and tends to reset some entries on the fly... and SuSE uses it's own fstab layout and commands, which are not quite compatible with fedora fstab (or anyone elses).

You will see from the syslog that fedora can see all the hard drives - perhaps what you want is to mount all the filesystems on all the hard-drives? For this you use the "mount" command.

In general, SuSE 10 offers a better desktop than Fedora right now. If you are used to SuSE, you won't get much advantage out of fedora.

is there a more graphicly user friendly linux distro out there better than SUSE 10.0

The freindliest so far would be Ubuntu.
Very trim compared with SuSE though - you generally find yourself doing a lot of post install on a fast connection.

See...
http://easylinux.info/wiki/Ubuntu

In a fedora terminal - type "fdisk -l" and it will tell you all the partitions and fs's that it can "see". You can mount them from cli using the mount command (read man page) or you can edit fstab using the fedora format (man fstab) to get them mounted automatically during boot time. Otherwise fedora will not assume you want to mount partitions that are not needed to run fedora (this is a Good Thing, trust me.)

thanks i think i will just use ubunto. why would suse not see the vfat partition of the fedora harddrive?

You can simply mount it with the mount(8) command and use an option to force read/write, I guess.

mount -t vfat -o rw /dev/hdd5 /mnt/hdd-vfat

... of course you will need to make the /mnt/hdd-vfat directory first.

ls -l /mnt/hdd-vfat
to check the permissions ... suspect you may have ro access because the SuSE user dosn't own the files. Again, this is a Good Thing.

Hi,

Good discussion. I am a newbie to Linux. I have Fedora Core4 installed on my PC. When i was trying to mount a NTFS partition using :
mount -t ntfs /dev/hda2 /mnt/d
But it was throwing an error saying "unknown file system".
the same command is working fine with vfat file system.
Is this is the correct way to mount an NTFS?

mount -t ntfs /dev/hda2 /mnt/d

yes. this is the correct way to mount ntfs.
You may not have the ntfs file system support compiled ... you go to /usr/src/kernels/<your kernel> in cli and type "make xconfig".

In the tree there is a section titles "file system support" - highlight that and you'll see NTFS support box is empty. Click on the box so it has a dot in it, save and exit.

Then, in cli again, do make modules, then make modules install. Hopefully that will be all that is required.

Note: this driver provides read-only support. The best way to exchange files between windows and linux is to create a vfat partition and assign it a windows drive letter (in windows). Use that for anything you want to share.

Of course, you could always install captive.