Help on Linux

[CAVERNA2K]

Hello:


How do I get my Windows partition files and put them to run/listen/use in Linux mode? And the inverse? Man, Linux is somehow weirdo, But: my cable DL rate was @ 20Kbps. In Linux it is some 80kbps... Even got a few 100... man... And: It lasted only 30 minutes to install, WIN used about and hour and a half to do the same... I'm in love with Linus Trovars now...



Any help I'll be very pleased.

[the real pacman]

Basicly you say
mount -t type device mountpoint
where "type" is the filesystem type (ext2, FAT, etc), "device" is the
name of the UNIX device representing the drive (or more commonly for
hard drives, the partition of the drive which has the filesystem you
wanted to mount) and "mountpoint" is where the filesystem will appear
in the UNIX directory tree. This is detailed under "man mount".

Your first IDE hard disc is named "/dev/hda", your second "hdb" and so
forth. SCSI discs are named "/dev/sda", "sdb" etc. Those are named for the
device as a whole (the whole disc, not slices (aka partitions) of it).

Supposing your second disc is named "/dev/hdb", then the partitions are
named "hdb1", "hdb2" etc. You can find out what partitions are on a
disc (assuming it _is_ partitioned, which fixed discs tend to be and
removable discs tend not to be) by saying:
fdisk -l /dev/hdb
to list the partitions. For our boot disc (hda) here I get:

[home/cameron]#janus*> fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 32 heads, 63 sectors, 330 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2016 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 34 307 276192 6 FAT16
/dev/hda2 308 329 22176 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 * 1 2 1984+ a OS/2 Boot Manager
/dev/hda4 3 33 31248 16 Hidden FAT16

This shows that this disc has 4 partitions. The main two are hda1 and hda2,
being the old Windows C drive (hda1) and the LINUX /boot partition (hda2).
You can see the Boot Manager there (this is/was a multiboot machine) on
partition hda3.

We choose to mount the legacy Windoze drives under /mnt on our Linux box,
so C: is mounted as /mnt/C, so forth. To mount that:
- The mount point must exist, so
mkdir /mnt/C
chmod 755 /mnt/C
This need be done just once.
- Mount the partition onto that directory. From the above table
you can see that the FAT16 partition is named "/dev/hda1", so:
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/C
"vfat" is a Linux filesystem driver which recognises FAT16 and
FAT32 Windows filesystems.

Now you can ls the /mnt/C directory etc. Thus:

[home/cameron]#janus*> ls /mnt/C
Program Files config.sys ffastun.ffo msdos.--- setuplog.old windows
autoexec.bat detlog.old ffastun0.ffx msdos.sys setuplog.txt
bootlog.prv detlog.txt ibminst netlog.txt suhdlog.dat
bootlog.txt ffastun.ffa io.sys recycled system.1st
command.com ffastun.ffl logo.sys scandisk.log temp

To make this happen at boot time you need to make an entry in your
/etc/fstab file, which lists filesystems, mountpoints and whether thy
should be mounted automatically or not. See "man fstab" for details.
Here's the first few lines of janus' fstab file:

/dev/hdc8 / ext2 defaults 1 1
/dev/hda2 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdc7 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy ext2 noauto 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 user,noauto,ro 0 0
/dev/hdc1 /opt ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda1 /mnt/C vfat ro,uid=500 1 2
/dev/hdc5 /mnt/E vfat uid=500 1 2

You can see:

/ comes from our main drive, hdc (master on the second IDE bus; hdb
would be the slave on the first IDE bus), because our boot drive
(hda) is fairly small.
/boot from hda
a swap area on hdc
descriptions for the floppy and cdrom so we can say
mount /mnt/floppy
or
mount /mnt/cdrom
because mount knows to read /etc/fstab to find out the details.
/opt from hdc
/mnt/C from hda (Windows C: drive)
/mnt/E from hdc (Windows E: drive)
On these last two, that "uid=500" line is because Windows doesn't
understand users, so we're saying when we mount these, pretend
all the files are owned by uid 500 .

That should get you started.

PS. As far as I know you can't mouth a linux partition to NTFS or FAT 32, but if you can, Casull knows how...

[CAVERNA2K]

Is there a simply way to play my mp3 that are in the windows partition in the Linux mode? Man, I just learned how to customize the whatch, the mouse and the keyboard. I just got idea of what I can do when not in danger mode, Aka Root Mode. Man, it's like discovering windows again, but starting to learn with win98se...


PacMan: thanx for the advice, but i'm too newbie in Linux for these advenced stuff.

[the real pacman]

Well, I'm against you logged in as root, ICQ me if you need to, 50708993. Mount your FAT 32 drive and play them simple. Also keep your FAT 32 drive mounted, it can come in handy. I remember when I lost my ADSL in linux when I first installed it. That was a scary moment, no problem! Boot into win98, download nessesary rpm files and boot back into linux, fix the problems, done.

Trust me, its worth it, and its really not hard to do...

Aside from that, back to the subject of root... My friend once told me this:

"The last time root walked among mortals. Root died for the mortals sins..."

Meaning only use root when you are changing system stuff. Don't ever go on xchat as root, most distro's will warn you, but if you do, your system will explode... litterally...