OK, any brain surgery that you do in Linux is done in the command prompt. so you must open the terminal window, which will be somewhere on your desktop or in the menus. It will open a command prompt a little like an MS-DOS window.
Now, first become root, like this
su
then entering root password. Now, we need to locate the partition you want to try and mount, so you need to know that
hda - is primary master IDE device
hdb - is primary slave IDE device
hdc - is secondary master IDE device
hdd - is secondary slave IDE device
Knowing that that is the case, now we just need to confirm the partition's name, which (if we take the example of the partition being on hdb) we can investigate with this command:-
more /proc/partitions | grep "hdb"
You will see something like this:-
3 64 80043264 hdb 2733 12376 18285 8810 333 751 2176 5600 -13 442020 37312332
3 65 32764536 hdb1 1952 9956 11912 1720 8 0 8 420 0 1630 2140
3 66 1 hdb2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3 69 32764536 hdb5 36 3 43 70 0 0 0 0 0 70 70
3 70 14506663 hdb6 741 2408 6298 6940 325 751 2168 5180 0 5360 12120
Try to locate your partition, remembering that hdb1 is the first partition, etc. Look at the third column of numbers to locate the size.
Now, suppose we now decide that its hdb6 that we want - that this is our FAT32 partition. OK, now we want to mount it. To mount a device (like a partition, or a cd-rom disk or something) we need to mount it into a mount point. A mount point is a normal directory (usually containing nothing before the mount event). We create one like this:-
mkdir /mnt/fat32
now try to mount it, with this command:-
mount /dev/hdb6 /mnt/fat32
essentially, mount THIS DEVICE, into THIS POINT. Its not really that complicated. If you get an error, try the following and / or think again about what you are doing:-
mount -t vfat /dev/hdb6 /mnt/fat32
Now, if this works, change directory into /mnt/fat32 with this command
cd /mnt/fat32
if you do a
ls
command, you will get a listing of the contents. Is that all of your stuff? Good. Now, we want to make the partition be always mounted when we boot up, to do this we will need to edit a configuration file called /etc/fstab, which stands for file system table.
Here is what /etc/fstab looks like :-
/dev/hda5 / ext2 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
/dev/hda6 /games vfat uid=500 0 0
/dev/hdb5 /images vfat uid=500 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb6 /home ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdb1 /vault vfat uid=500 0 0
/dev/hda1 /win9x vfat uid=500 0 0
/dev/hda7 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /dvd-rom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /cd-rw udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/ataraid/d1p6 /raidstripe ntfs ro,uid=500 0 0
You want to add an entry to tell linux to automatically mount the device with certain parameters each time. try creating an entry like this:-
/dev/hdb6 /mnt/fat32 vfat uid=500 0 0
(note that the mount points can be anywhere, not just in /mnt, but that's the convention. I normally choose to break it these days....)
BUT WAIT! You should first get the uid if you are logging on a a user other than root (which you should be!!!!!) to get both write and read access. If your account name is paul, try this:
cat /etc/passwd | grep "paul"
you will see something like this:-
paul:x:500:500::/home/paul:/bin/bash
Take a note of that number and use it in your /etc/fstab file in the uid= bit above. If you are (in the bad habbit of) only logging in as root, then use this command:-
cat /etc/passwd | grep "root"
to get the information that you need.
post back here if you need any more help.
