I have 2 hard drives, with partitions on each. Here is my fstab:

/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_MAXTOR_STM38021_5LR7ZA22-part3 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_MAXTOR_STM38021_5LR7ZA22-part5 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_MAXTOR_STM38021_5LR7ZA22-part6 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST340810A_6FB0MNEK-part1 /windows/C ntfs-3g users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST340810A_6FB0MNEK-part2 /windows/D vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,utf8=true 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_MAXTOR_STM38021_5LR7ZA22-part2 swap swap defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0


On the second drive is Mepis on sdb5 (root) and sdb6 (home) but Suse (10.3) does not "see" either of them. Suse is installed on sdb3. Suse also does not see the swap on sdb2. I'm using krusader to view disks.

The fstab lines containing ~part5 and ~part6 I added myself; they were not in fstab originally. Still doesn't work.

My hard drives contain:

sda1 = Windows, ntfs 20G
sda2 = (storage) fat32 20G
sdb1 = extended 50G
sdb2 = linux swap 1.5G
sdb3 = Suse 20G
sdb4 = (exists but not used) 5G
sdb5 = Mepis /root 13G
sdb6 = Mepis /home 37G

Suse does not see sdb2, sdb4, sdb5, sdb6. Suse sees the windows partitions on sda fine.

What do I do so Suse sees all partitions on sdb?

In fstab, the instruction are to mount three different partitions mounted to "/". While this is legal, the system will only see the last one mounted.

The convention is to mount in /mnt partitions which are not part of the tree for your booted system. Est each one up with a separate mountpoint---eg /mnt/mepis1, /mnt/mepis2, etc.

I'm surprised that SUSE didn't automatically set this up--what version are you using?

openSUSE version 10.3

Your instructions soundd promising but didn't change anything. I tried a couple of variations, rebooted, but nothing.

Have you tried manually mounting the partitions?

Also, if you simply make an entry in fstab, nothing new will get mounted unless you re-boot or mount manually. I'm a little fuzzy on the options you are using. Normally, I just use defaults--which include auto-mounting at boot time. "noauto" would mean that you must manually mount.

Once a mount instruction is in fstab, you can manually mount with just the mountpoint.

"man mount" and "man fstab" for more detail.

How do you mount something you can't see?

For file browsing I usually use Krusader. I have both user-mode and root-mode set up to auto-mount file systems (partitions) as soon as I click on them, but you have to see it before you can click on it. I also tried File Manager Root User Mode.

I installed kwikdisk. It at least can see the entres made in fstab. But clicking on it results in an error message saying the mount point does not exist.

In konsole, using the command "mount /dev/sdb5" reports "mount: can't find /dev/sdb5 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab".

So I made the entries in mtab, rebooted, same thing.

In konsole again, command "mount /mnt/mepis1" reports "mount: mount point /mnt/mepis1 does not exist" even though that's the path reported by kwikdisk.

So I'm at a dead end again, unless you can think of something else. (Please!)

Did you create the /mnt/mepis1 directory? Also, /etc/mtab is for reporting what is mounted. You don't edit it.

That got it! Thank you. I don't know why I didn't think of that; I had to do something very similar once before.

Anyway, problem solved. Thanks again.