? this is probally an easy question, but I can't seem to find a straight answer..

thanks

On the contrary, I haven't got the slightest clue
as to what "mounting a file-system recursively"
could possibly mean ...


Cheers,
Tink

heh, sorry that does sound a bit cryptic, doesnt it, .

I mean recursively as in each time i boot up,

and im mounting my win partitions as in " mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/C"

I remember one distro I was using had a flag you could add like -r or somthing to make it static

I read this post earlier, saw you mention recursive.. I was thinking.. what the heck could he mean?!

Anyhow, now we're on the same page...

I have never heard of the mount command being able to add an entry to the fstab, nor does my manpage tell me of such.

I'll tell you what, I'll just teach you so you can do this on any linux based system the manual way.
1. Login as root by running from a terminal [b]su[/a] followed by typing the root password.

2. Open the file /etc/fstab in your favorite text editor.

3. On a new line at the bottom of the file, add the line
4. Save and quit the file /etc/fstab

5. Then run mount -a and the NTFS partition will be mounted. It will also be mounted automatically after reboot so that you do not have to do anything after you reboot.

6. Double check the setup by rebooting. Does it work? If so, be sure to give me a hollar so I know it worked.

regards,

thanks jon, I'll try that right away, but tell me , what does the -a do?
because i am actually mounting 3 partitions from 2 drives, one of them being vfat.

would the procedure change?

TIA

The -a option to mount stands for 'all'. It tries to mount all of the entries found in the /etc/fstab.

The file-system type to use for the FAT32 drive is vfat.

Read through the mount man page. There are options such as uid=, gid=, dmask= and fmask= which you might want to use for an NTFS or VFAT mount. You cannot use the 'chmod' or 'chown' commands for these filesystems so they need to be set in the mount entry of /etc/fstab.

Above poster is correct. It attempts to mount all entries in /etc/fstab.

That means, if you just added a device in /etc/fstab, and then proceded to mount -a, then everything in the file /etc/fstab would attempt to mount. (If it was already mounted, then it doesn't bother)

That's an effective way to 'reload' the fstab and apply its settings when you add a device to it.

Remember to tell me if you get it working the way you want.

NOTE: I forgot to tell you earlier, the fstab entry line I hooked you up with will only mount the drive as READ-ONLY. I did this for safety precautions because I've heard too many people say that it's dangerouse to write to NTFS from linux. Also I believe you'd need a kernel module (or compiled in to kernel directly) in order to write to NTFS. Best to play it safe and do read-only. (thats what the ro stands for in the fstab entry line)


sincerely,
jon