.| Getting Linux to recognize CDs and Flash drives and Disk partitions |
| To auto-mount or not |
| Creating mount points |
| The hard disk partition |
| The CD(s) |
| The Flash drive |
| A Floppy drive |
| Author |
| Licence |
This article discusses editing the file /etc/fstab, so you have access to the items above.
For setting up a disk partition visible to both Windows and Linux, see:
http://savage.net.au/Linux/html/dual-booting.html
Auto-mounting means making a file system accessible as soon as you log in after booting.
A hard disk partition will be available as soon as Linux boots, so in that case, auto-mounting makes sense.
Since, at boot time, the CD drive may be empty, and the flash drive may not be plugged, auto-mounting in these cases is not appropriate.
Sometimes you have to use the mkdir command to create what's called a mount point, and sometimes you don't.
A mount point is simply the name under Linux by which you refer to a drive.
So, if your floppy is mounted at /mnt/floppy, then to list the files on the floppy, you would run this command:
shell>ls /mnt/floppy
I'm not really clear on this, so don't panic if the information below is not perfect. If you can't access a drive after editing /etc/fstab and rebooting, try creating the mount point manually, as below, and rebooting.
The article on dual-booting, mentioned above, gives you noe way to do it. Here's another:
Edit /etc/fstab and add this line (modify as appropriate for your set up):
/dev/hda4 /mnt/g vfat defaults 0 0
where hda is your '4'th partition on your first ('a') hard disk 'hd', and you've created the directory '/mnt/g' with:
shell>mkdir /mnt/g
and 'vfat' is the way that partition was formatted. The formatting program probably called it FAT-32, and 'defaults' is the options Linux is to use to access the partition. The 2nd last '0' refers to a dump program, which we can ignore, and the last '0' means do not perform a file system check at boot time.
I have 2, an old read-only one and a newer burner. So we at to /etc/fstab:
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
This sits on a USB port, which is known to Linux as the first partition ('1') on the first ('a') serial device 'sd', so create the mount point with:
shell>mkdir /mnt/flash
and add this to /etc/fstab:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/flash vfat noauto 0 0
Add this to /etc/fstab:
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
Ron Savage .
Home page: http://savage.net.au/index.html
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