Windows Patition

[Gosha]

hi, ive had 2 versions of linux, mandrake 6.1 and redhat 6.1....i had mandrake first, there, my windows hard drive was /mnt/, but now i installed red hat and i cant find my windows partition any where, can someone help?

[Dexter]

mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt

[Gosha]

Originally posted by Dexter:
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt

ok, but where do i type that in consol? i tried, it didnt work

[Dexter]

Is your windows drive your primary master? If so, it should have worked. I don't know if it matters, but make sure you're root. I haven't been at this long myself.

[Gosha]

Originally posted by Dexter:
Is your windows drive your primary master? If so, it should have worked. I don't know if it matters, but make sure you're root. I haven't been at this long myself.

ya, it is my primary, is there a spave between the /mnt? and is there like a program in linux that can do it for me?

[furrycat]

There is a program in Linux that lets you mount partitions. It's called mount.

At the console (or in an xterm, rxvt, eterm, wterm, whatever) and as root, you type

mount <space> -t <space> vfat <space> /dev/hda1 <space> /mnt

As pointed out by Dexter, this assumes that your Windows drive is the primary IDE master (/dev/hda, with the slave being hdb, secondary master and slave being hdc and hdd respectively) and that the FAT32 filesystem is on the first partition (hence hda1). It also assumes you have VFAT support in the kernel. You may not, in which case you'll need to load the vfat.o module with

insmod fat
insmod vfat

You can make the mounting of the drive happen automagically on bootup by adding a line like the following to /etc/fstab

/dev/hda1 /mnt vfat defaults 0 0

The first three columns tell the system init scripts which drive to mount and how. The fourth column (defaults) says that it should be mounted "normally." Other possible values here are "ro" for read-only or "user" which lets non-root folk mount and unmount the drive. The last two columns (here both zero) affect filesystem dumping and checking. The first 0 might as well be 0 if you don't know what dump is and the second should be 0 for filesystems that aren't ext2 (OK, not strictly true but if you understand why it isn't true you'll understand why newbies shouldn't be concerned)

Oh by the way, it's a hell of a lot more helpful to explain what error messages are returned rather than saying "it didn't work." Did you get "device or resource busy" or "the kernel does not recognise /dev/hda1 as a vfat filesystem" or "bad superblock" or "no such file or directory" or "permission denied" whatever the real error messages are?

[geekd]

furrycat - good reply

gosh - make sure you do it as root

-geekd