how to mount fat32 drives during startup???

[kosu 0]

i'm running fc2.how to mount fat32 drives during startup???

 

[Dapper Dan 0]

Are you wanting to mount a reader/writer stick, an external hard drive or a partition on your internal hard drive that's already formatted fat32?

[blackpage 0]

greets kosu

 

I'll start off with the "HDD-aspects" of mounting if it's all the same to you.

 

I'm not using Fedora, but I'm pretty sure it comes with something that one could call a "control center". In there you should find some graphical mount-tool that lets you "glue" your fat32-partitions to proper mount-points under your *ix-file system. Just in case you can't find something like a "control center", here are a few tips on "how to do it the real way"

 

The first thing, of course, is to know ...

 

1. Where To Add Permanent Mounts

The right place to include hdd-partitions into the *ix-file structure is the file /etc/fstab. So we definitely have to open and edit this file ...

 

Command:

Code:

username@machine: emacs /etc/fstab

(or any other editor that floats your boat)

 

2. Assigning Devices To Mount-Points

To successfully add your fat32-partitions to /etc/fstab you need to know 2 things:

 

A) what logical drives are the fat partitions on

the latter mount-point

 

Ad A: most *ix-flavours refer to partitions in this way ...

1st partition on the drive that is set to "Master" on the Primary IDE-controller is /dev/hda1, the 2nd partiton would be /dev/hda2, and so on. So if your "C:\"-drive is the first partition on your primary master disk "/dev/hda1" would be the linux-device for it.

 

Ad B: that's even simpler, cause the mount-points are just the names of directories that you plan to mount your partitions under. A good choice in your case would be e.g. /mnt/c_fat32/ or just /mnt/c.

 

And here are the lines you would need to add to your fat32-partitions to /etc/fstab (assuming they are the first partitions on your primary and secondary master drives):

 

Code:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/c vfat user,rw,exec 0 0/dev/hdb1 /mnt/d vfat user,rw,exec 0 0

 

You already know about the first two parameters. The 3rd one tells linux of what type the partition is ("vfat" e.g. means "fat32"). The the 4th parameter block (user,exec ...) tells linux about the restrictions you want to apply to the partition. And the final 2 parameters set up some sort of "error-handling" and are used (at boottime) for the "dump" and "fsck"-commands. For fat32 partitions keep those set to zero. Last thing to do in the editor is to save the changes.

 

3. Creating The Mount-Point Directories

All that's left is to create the directories you referred to in /etc/fstab. This is quickly accomplished by

 

Code:

username@machine: mkdir /mnt/cusername@machine: mkdir /mnt/d

 

... or whatever you used in fstab.

 

4. Try It Out

Fire up a shell and issue the command ...

Code:

mount /mnt/c

 

If you get no error messages you can browse your fat-drive with "ls /mnt/c" e.g. That's the basics for mounting IDE-harddisks. If your fat32-partitons are on SCSI- or SATA-drives the respective linux device names would be something like "/dev/sd<xy>".

 

And in case you actually want to mount USB-stuff, then some prerequisites might be necessary (like loading modules "usb-storage" or "usb-ohci"). But for that you'd need to provide some more infos.

 

As a failsafe, in case anything goes wrong, check out these ...

http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man8/mount.8.html

http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man5/fstab.5.html

 

(some nicely displayed man pages on the web)

 

Hope that helps