after a complete pc-crash i firsrt used linux lycoris, which was a complete desaster where nothing worked, apart from the internet.

now i installed suse 9.1 and am very satisfied with the first things; sound, printer, office-programs, internet seem to work excellently. and the looks are great though being a little bit too much anti alias (can i adjust this?). but still my digital camera won't work. although being better than lycoris which didn't find anything at all, suse opens 4 (!) usb drives (while making my usb-stick invisible) but it says that the folder cannot be opened. the name of the first one is "file:/media/usb-storage-0D9652020001:0:0:0p3" and as far as i can see, it is the last number variing between the four cameras... i use a medion md40696. the camera and graphic work (corel) is absolutely essential and the fact that i became so sick of lycoris let me try to install win xp, which didn't work because i simply lost my codes...
so then i wanted the windows partition to be deleted and reformated, i chose this in the install menue. but still it exists, including the installation files. why? and where and how do i see the main partition? i want to begin again with uploading my music on the pc, working with my pictures etc. ...

regards
ungua

p.s.: another thing: both in icq and here the key-combination "alt+s" doesn't work. where to adjust this? thank everyone for helping...

edit: just found the key combination option in icq and changed it.

I take it you're using the supermount option, which has caused a number of problems with memory sticks. You should first try the Yast Online Update and get the fix for supermount. After installing that, if you still can't access the stick you'll have to switch off supermount and set up a mount point for it manually.

What brand and model is the camera?

Robin

as posted above i use a medion md40696, some folks claiming it was never compiled for linux. the memory stick works, but not the camera - i did a yast online update with all options yesterday, no changes. i don't know yet how to mount a disc manually. in this concern, my partitions do not really look like i want them to do: http://home.arcor.de/bergenbilder/linuxquestions.jpg
aim is a big data-partition, accessable from two smaller system-partitions - suse including one swap-partition, and xp, which should be installed by today if i wouldn't struggle with this university-task because of spending too much time in internet-forums...

best regards
ungua

Seeing as how you 're using a German Linux: is it easier for you to switch to German?

The root partition is quite small; you'll need a lot of space for that one, as all your programms will go there (unless you make a /usr partition). SuSE also puts a lot in /opt, so you might consider having that in its own partition, too. For a large data partition, you should mount that one to /home. You can use Yast to repartition, and you can simply copy files from one location to another. But you should keep in mind that you won't see data stored in /home when you mount a partition at /home. The data won't be lost, you just can't see it because mounting goes before actual data. You have to copy files from /home to another location (or simply rename the directory as root) and then copy it to the newly mounted partition under /home.

Now the longish number for your USB stick strongly suggests that you have supermount enabled. I have had a similar problem a couple of months ago, and this thread helped me a lot:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=207303

Regarding the camera itself I can't help much.

Robin

my original plan was to give 5gb to linux. but it seems like my plans don't turn out to work...
that sound good! but this means i have to format everything again? (i ask because i thought i was on the way to a well done system...) how do i mount a hdd? [very newbie question]
like i said, the usb-sticks mounts just fine. the four other lines saying "usb-storage" come up when i plug in my camera which, in fact, is just one...
i'm originally from germany and have to handle a couple of languages everyday - but i thought linux is sometimes that complicated that i'll have a try with my mother's language and stick to norwegian when i become save with linux...

best regards
ungua

I was only asking about German because I'm German, too, so we could just as well use that language...

Anyway, use an editor to take a look at your file /etc/fstab. This is where your mounting information is stored. Here's an excerpt from mine:

These are the lines which apply to my harddisks. The leftmost entry tells you which partition the line refers to. 'sda' is 'Scsi Disk A', 'hda' is 'Hard Disk A', which shows you that I've got two physical disks, one an SCSI device, one a normal IDE drive. The numbers are partitions: sda1 is a partition which houses my normal root partition (the slash symbol), sda2 is swap, hda6 is a FAT-formatted area which I can access both from Linux and Windows, which I use for data exchange; hda5 is another partition which holds my documents.

What this tells you: The SCSI drive is all taken up by / and the various subdirectories, all on one physical harddisk; and the swap partition is on that one, too. But my documents, which seem to be in a subdirectory of /home/bitpicker, are actually located on a different harddisk, part of which is taken up by a Windows partition, and actually a second Windows partition which is invisible to Linux as I don't mount it anywhere.

Initially the documents were on sda1, too. In order to move them over I first renamed the directory to something else (say, /docs), and created a new empty directory /Documents in /home/bitpicker (physically still on the SCSI disk). Then I created and formatted the hda5 partition, and afterwards added the line referring to it to fstab. I could then simply mount the hda5 partition 'into' this subdirectory of my /home/bitpicker directory. When I then copied all files from /docs back to /Documents they actually were transferred to the new partition, and therefore to the other disk.

In contrast to Windows, you don't have to think in 'harddisks' or other such units when you work with Linux. A whole partition can be addressed as a single directory, just as you do with CDs you mount.

You don't even have to reformat partitions unless you need to change the file systems, you just have to copy the files somewhere in between if you change mount points. For instance, if you copy some files into /media/cdrom (supposing that's where you mount CDs) you can see the files there. If you then mount an actual CD to /media/cdrom, you see the content of the CD there, and the files you copied are momentarily inaccessible and invisible. If you then unmount the CD again, the files are visible and accessible again in the directory. You just changed the address, as if you swapped house numbers with your neighbour.

Does that make the concept any clearer?

Robin

deinen beitrag musste ich erstmal verdauen; sehr gut geschrieben!! nur bin ich zur zeit fuerchterlich unkonzentriert und es dauert sicher noch ein paar tage, bis ich diese wohl eigentlich einfach information verdaut habe... ich mache aber mal auf englisch weiter; wegen information fuer die nachwelt und so...
my usb-stick was unplugged.
isn't it like you can access ntfs also from linux? else i read about these projects:
http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/ (ntfs lesen/schreiben)
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ (ntfs nur lesen)
i think i understood the concept now. but i still don't know how to mount a partition - and for me it is not really visible how i could mount the big data-hdd i'd like to have.

many thanks for taking your time!!
ungua

The size of the partition to mount doesn't make any difference. Let's say you've got this new harddisk and you want to use it for your home directory. With YAST you can format it and set its mount point to /home; but of course you'll have to copy all files in your current home directory elsewhere first, or else you won't see them anymore after the harddisk is mounted to /home. As you should be working as root, that does not touch your root home directory (/root).

In YAST you can format the partition to use, say, reiserfs, and you can set its mount point to /home. Any users you add after this moment will be installed on that new partition, any files you copy there (such as the content of the former /home directory) will actually go on the new harddisk. You don't have to mount the harddisk manually; anything you copy to the directory 'home' afterwards goes to that new partition.

Regarding NTFS: Linux can read it and with some additional tools even write to it (with some risk), but with FAT filesystems the process is more secure.

Robin

i have just one hdd, but am still thinking in windows-partitions. so i'll try to mount everything through yast as soon as i have windows going and a working machine. thank you!! i'll surely give feedback than again...

regards
ungua

If you just have one single harddisk, there is no real need to have partitions apart from / (root) on the Linux side of it in the first place, except for /swap (which uses a different filesystem).

I suppose you have Windows running on one half of the disk and want Linux on the other. YAST will recognize your Windows partition, and it will not touch it unless you expressly tell it to. Let it use the unformatted part of the HD. It will give you a suggestion of what to do with it, and you might just as well go with that suggestion.

The only problem you might have is the boot loader. I did not succeed in having SuSE write a decent boot block on the Windows 2000 HD so that I could boot either system. That may have been because of my two HD setup, with one IDE and one SCSI, though. I am using a floppy disk for booting, which lets me choose which boot block to use.

Robin

okay, i'll just give a short summary how far i understand the topic:
[list=1][*] i have one physical hdd, 40gb.[*] trying to install windows i partitioned it the following way: 3gb system for windows, 5gb for linux, some hundred mb for swap and the rest as "data-partition".[*] afterwards i formated the windows-c:\ into ntfs, which after all turned out to be fat16 and the windows install did not work because i lost my key. by now, i run one os, which is suse9.1 - because: [*] i then installed linux suse9.1 which was told to completely delete the windows partition under installation, which did not happen.[*] what is visible now are two partitions that show altogether ~7gb of my 40gb, home is obviously mounted to a minor partition, which is not the windows-one because that one still exists and has the wanted size.[*] looking through yast i don't find a place where to "mount" the rest of my harddisc.[/list=1]

so, the question still is: how to mount the bigger part of my hdd? i'm very sorry for being so braindead but my focus is on an university task and i always have some problems following this kind of discussion... anyway, i'm very grateful for this free support!!

lieb gruss
ungua

Ok, somehow everything seems to have been messed up royally. Do you still want to install both Windows and Linux, especially now that the Windows key is lost? The simplest thing would be to start over. If you choose to do that:

Get rid of all partitions you have now. I don't think it is a very good idea to have a single data partition for both systems, as writing on it with Windows will frag up the permissions set for Linux, and you can't use a Linux file system for it in the first place; but if you don't use a Linux file system, permissions can't be saved at all. If you really need a place for some data you want to access from both systems, make it separate.

Now that your hd is empty again, install Windows on half of it; let Windows make a single 20 GB NTFS partition, or if you prefer, 10 GB for the system and program files as c:, and 10 GB for myfiles, documents etc. I used to do it that way so that I could format c: and reinstall the system without having to worry about my data.

The other half of the hard disk does not get formatted by Windows in any way, just leave it fallow. Once your Windows system works, install SuSE.

During the installation process, Yast will come up with a way to partition the empty space. You can simply use, say, 1GB for /swap and the rest for /. If you want to, you can simulate what we did for Windows by using 10 GB for /, 1 GB for /swap and 9 GB for /home; I don't think there is much use in using smaller partitions for different directories now, maybe you find a better and more complicated solution later when you know your way around Linux, but for now let's keep it simple. Just one thing: if you really want to have an area which both systems can access, set aside 1 or 2 GB or how much you need for it and have Yast format it with FAT32. In Yast, give it a mount point such as /winfiles. You are not limited to the mount point options Yast gives you in the drop down box, you can enter any mount point you like, and Yast will set it up for you. You only have to set the sizes for the partitions, the mount points and the file systems; swap for /swap, reiserfs for / and /home, FAT32 for /winfiles.

Near the end of the installation Yast will try to install the boot loader. This accesses the boot block set up by Windows, which, as I said, didn't work on my system. If it doesn't work on yours either, you can repair the Windows boot block with the repair options from the Windows CD and install the boot loader on a floppy disc instead, using Yast. If you boot from this floppy you get to choose between Windows and Linux, if you don't use the floppy you automatically boot Windows.

I'll send you a second message about how to change the system you have now, if you don't want to start over.

Robin

So, here's how not to start over:

Go to Yast2, System, Partitionieren. After a security dialogue you'll get the partitioning tool, showing your current partitions.

Here you'll probably see an entry /dev/hda - this is your 40 GB harddisk. The second row should reflect this size. Then there's probably an entry /dev/hda1, formatted to FAT 16 - that's your current Windows partition. There will also be one or more entries hdaX (with X being any number) saying 'Linux native', maybe one saying '/' and one saying '/home' - these are the mount points for these partitions. There's yet another for /swap.

If you choose 'Anlegen' you can distribute the free space you still have on the hard disk among other partitions and mountpoints, but there's little use for that now. You'd have to create new mount points for that, and as all the standard directories already exist in a working SuSE environment, you'd have to use them manually. Instead, do the following:

If you want to get rid of the Windows partition, simply choose 'Löschen' for it. This does not mean that you can simply add it to the free space and have all of it as one partition, as the partition needs to be in one chunk! If you've got even a single bit of data between two chunks of any size, you can't combine them.

The other partitions can be resized using the options in 'Bearbeiten', if they are adjacent to free space. You'll have to find out which of your existing partitions border on such free space. You can then simply choose the largest value Yast allows you to choose, or anything under that value, and add the space to the partition in question.

Any changes you set here will be made only when you finalize your settings by clicking on 'Anwenden'.

Robin

hi bitpicker...
i finally figured out when i might come to format my harddisc, after 12th decembre, i hope. than it's three days left before i leave to germany. but: i don't have any dos-mode left. will it work to format everything from inside linux!?

best regards
ungua

If you want to get rid of everything you can simply format the entire HD when you boot from your SuSE CD or DVD during the installation process. If you only want to get rid of certain partitions, you can do that from an installed SuSE through Yast, only don't delete the partitions your Linux uses... Deleting and formatting the Windows partition is no problem.

Robin