Other Hard Drives

[Paladin9]

Could someone tell me how to browse other hard drive in linux?  I know you must type / to get to the root of the drive, but how the hell do you read other drives?  I know how to mount CD drives and the floppy drive, which is easy, but what about other hard drives?

[voidmain]

You browse them like any other drive.  It all depends on where you mount the partitions on those drives.  You can use "ls" (which any of your favorite parameters) or you can use a graphical file manager. To see where all of your partitions are mounted type "mount" or "df".  In Linux and UNIX there are no "drive letters".  You can add all of the drives you want and you mount them on any directory that you like under the "/" directory (usually you create a directory to mount the partition on).  

For instance, you might have a second drive with lots of space that you want everyone's "home" directories to go on. You could create a large partition on that drive and mount it as "/home".  Then everything you browse under the "/home" directory is on that specific partition on that specific drive.

Here's a coupla links that may explain it a little better:
http://linuxnewbies.editthispage.com/linuxworld
http://www.ctssn.com/linux/lesson9.html

[ September 10, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[TheQuirk]

you mount your other hard drive as if it was a floppy of a CD.

for example, lets say you want to mount partion 1 on you first master IDE Hard drive. you'll just do..

# mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hd2

The to browse it you just go to the folder you mounted it on (/mnt/hd2 in this example)

[ September 10, 2002: Message edited by: TheQuirk ]

[Paladin9]

Ok, then can you mount a FAT32 or NTFS partition?

[voidmain]

FAT32 is no problem and you can have read/write access. NTFS is a little tricky but you can get read only access with no problem.

[ September 10, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Paladin9]

i tried mounting the windows partions and i am still having problems. I have FAT32 and NTFS on my computer and LINUX would not take it.  I think i am doing it right because i was able to mount another ext3 partion.  At first it said that it did not exist in fstab.  well, i went to that file and added it, and now it says that fat and ntfs are not supported file systems by the kernel. I did this same procedure with the other ext3 partion i have and it actually worked.  But those damn windows partions will still not work.  Is there something that i am doing wrong?  

I am using Red Hat Linux 7.3 - if that means anything

[Master of Reality]

if you want to mount your windows partition do:
# mount -t vfat /dev/hda2 /mnt/windows
after making the folder: /mnt/windows (mkdir /mnt/windows) and replace '/dev/hda2' with wherever your windows partition really is:

/dev/hda means the first drive
/dev/hdb means the second drive
and /dev/hda1 (/dev/hdb1) would mean the first partition on the first drive (second drive)

[Paladin9]

HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!

It worked!  thanks for the help.

[choasforages]

quote:HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!  

most people feel the same when they play with linux and make it stand up and do something, i remeber when i burned cds in windows, and used them in linux, cuase i could figure out how to do what you asked, hollyshit is what i said, and read access on ntfs partitions, has saved my ass a few times.

[Centurian]

quote:Originally posted by Paladin9:
HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!

It worked!  thanks for the help.

Hey Paladin,

If you want to do it so it loads everything automatically. You can change your /etc/fstab file.

Here is what mine looks like including mounting some samba drives with smbfs.
***********
/dev/hda6 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
//bobbi/C /mnt/bobbi_c smbfs username=% 0 0
//bobbi/D /mnt/bobbi_d smbfs username=% 0 0
//kds1/C /mnt/kds1_c smbfs username=% 0 0
//kds1/D /mnt/kds1_d smbfs username=% 0 0
//kds2/C /mnt/kds2_c smbfs username=% 0 0
//kds2/D /mnt/kds2_d smbfs username=% 0 0
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,exec,codepage=850,ro,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,sync,exec,codepage=850,noauto 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda8 /usr ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda7 swap swap defaults 0 0
**********

The Samba drives (windows on other computers) and the windows drives on this comp are all automounted at boot. The floppie and CD have to be mounted to use. I use /usr/bin/usermount to quickly and efficiently mount and unmount them as I need them.

I use Mandrake 8.1 but it will be the same on any linux distro.

Hey Everyone,

I'm back. Well actually I never left. Been reading this forum for ever with out posting. I just had nothing to say until now.

[voidmain]

All right, here comes the cavalry. Centurian is back!

[Centurian]

quote:Originally posted by void main:
All right, here comes the cavalry. Centurian is back!

I would not call myself the cavalry. You have always been much better at linux than I ever was.  

Thanks for the welcome.  

[Paladin9]

I actually did change the fstab file and it did work (and i said holy shit again) but i still can not get my ntfs partition to work, it is my most imporatant one with most of my shit on it.  When i try to mount it, i get an error saying that "fs type ntfs is not supported by the kernel".  Am i doing it wrong or am i screwed?

[voidmain]

The kernel included with most Linux distros does not have NTFS support turned on by default as it is not rock solid (M$ doesn't publish the sort of info needed, common trend). You can recompile your kernel and turn on NTFS support but you'll only want to compile in "read-only" support. You'll want to follow the KERNEL-HOWTO or the instructions on the website of whatever distro you use to reconfigure/recompile the kernel. It's not really that hard but unless you've done it a few times and understand the concepts and the gotchas it can be quite daunting. Search your distro's web site first for a HOWTO on recompiling your kernel.  

Usually there are distro specific patches added to the kernel and it is usually best to get the source from the distro source so you can get it set up with the distro patches and default settings.  Then just go through the configure part (I usually do a "make xconfig" in the source directory) and flip on NTFS support.  But I can't stress enough of going through the docs on this one.  Of course you don't have to use the distro specific setup and you could get the latest kernel source from kernel.org but for a first timer I wouldn't suggest it, and would suggest that you follow your distro's instructions.

[ September 10, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]