[vox-tech] FSTAB Questions

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Tue 17 Feb 04, 10:54 AM, Robert G. Scofield <rscofield@afes.com> said:
> On Tuesday 17 February 2004 10:25, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> >
> > out of curiosity -- why did you reinstall?
> 
> My hard drive went bad.  In fact you were the one who said I needed a
> new hard drive.  So I installed Linux on the new hard drive.  Maybe
> "reinstall" was not the right word.

ahhh... ok, so you replaced the drive?   good.  i really think that was
the right thing to do.  for sure.

> > and when you say "windows isn't being mounted", do you mean at boot?
> > what happens when you type "mount /mnt/windows"?
> 
> Yes, it wasn't being mounted at boot.  I could mount Windows with the mount 
> command.
 
ok.  it's a bit complicated.  in the best of all worlds, /etc/fstab
would control automatic fs mounting, but it doesn't.  not directly.
what gets automatically mounted at boot is dependent on your init.d
files.

for instance, on my system, /etc/init.d/mountall.sh contains:

#
# Mount local file systems in /etc/fstab.
#
[ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && echo "Mounting local filesystems..."
mount -av -t nonfs,nosmbfs,noncpfs,noproc 2>&1 |
   egrep -v '(already|nothing was) mounted'


mount -a mounts all filesystems that don't have "noauto" and aren't of
type you see there (i'm not sure what nonfs means).

anyway, you may want to put your detective hat on and take a look at how
your filesystems are getting mounted at boot.  i'll prolly be a bit
different from my system (debian).

also, check out dmesg and /var/log/messages for relevent info.  perhaps
your system is trying to automount windows but can't for some reason.
that would be logged.
 
> > it depends.  did you plug the new hard drive in IDE 4 slot A or slot B?
> > if you put it in slot B, the drive spins at a faster rate and can
> > prematurely burn out the motor.  a lot of people who complained about
> > IBM deskstars crapping out early were guilty of using slot B.  since
> > then, IBM has placed slot AB converters, so for modern deskstars, it
> > doesn't matter.  if you own one of these things and it says "CHS"
> > somewhere on the drive itself, you have an older model.
> 
> On this computer it's IDE 1 (I believe.)  And it was an IBM deskstar
> that burned out.  I checked the Vox-tech archives and learned that
> people were having problems with the IBM deskstar.  At Fry's there's
> an Hitachi Deskstar.  But I bought a Maxtor at CompUSA after getting
> some information from Fry's employees that even I could figure out was
> bogus.

heh.  that was supposed to have been a joke.  ;-)   i was feeling goofy.

> > i can't see why unless you do something like mounting /usr/local under
> > /usr, you'd want to mount /usr first.  in your case, you prolly just
> > want to mount / before anything else (as we all do).
> 
> I think man fstab says something about mounting order and fscking order.
 
yeah, mitch confirmed this for me.

if B mounts underneath A, you want to mount A before you mount B.

you don't have any filesystms mounting under another filesystem (other
than / of course).

>  > so it looks good
> > to me.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 
> >
> > bob, that field of fstab (field 4) is essentially options for mount.  so
> > you can figure out what the options mean by doing "man mount".
> 
> Yeah I looked at that a little, which is why I had a feeling that "defaults" 
> would not let me write to the Windows partition.  But I tried it anyway.
> >
> >
> >
> > > Should I copy the Mandrake entry into my SuSE system?
> >
> > no.  you should do what works.  i know that sounds like a cop-out
> > answer, but it's the absolute truth.
> 
> Thanks for the input.
> 
> Stay warm back there.

absolutely.  it got up to 40 degrees a few days ago.  it felt downright
hot.  i even went out without a coat (i'm developing east coast
temperature insensitivity).

pete

-- 
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