Guest gaaslight Posted July 29, 2006 Report Share Posted July 29, 2006 I have OpenSUSE 10.1 sharing my hard drive with a Mandriva One installation. Can someone tell me how to access the Mandriva partition from SUSE?. I was able to see Windows XP NTSF partition right away when I first installed SUSE. but I have since evicted Windows from my computer and am dual booting the 2 linux distros. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted July 29, 2006 Report Share Posted July 29, 2006 Welcome aboard. :) If e.g. you want to mount it temporarily, type e.g. mount -t ext3 /dev/hdXX /mnt where XX must be replaced with the Mandriva partition naming (e.g. hda1) and ext3 with another fileysystem in case you use e.g. reiserfs or xfs,.... For always mounting the drive, you will have to add an entry for the Mandriva partition in SUSEs /etc/fstab and you should create a mountpoint like /mnt/mdv. If you need more help on that, take a look at the FAQ section of this board. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
payasam Posted August 2, 2006 Report Share Posted August 2, 2006 A related question, Arctic. I've had Win 98 SE and MDK/MDV for long. Just downloaded the "Minime" or bare bones version of PCLinuxOS. Am in it right now, running the CD live. Thinking it might be an idea to install it on hard drive and see what it's like. First, I shall have to create a partition or two on the /home of MDV. Don't know if MDV 2006 has a tool for that, and worry a bit about the PCLOS tool. Second, If I get the thing installed, what about the boot menu? I expect I shall have to edit the LILO config in MDV, assuming that PCLOS doesn't make its own LILO. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted August 2, 2006 Report Share Posted August 2, 2006 The easiest way would be to boot into Mandriva 2006 and log in as root (if you don't want to do everything from a command line). If you log in as normal user, the /home partition cannot be unmounted and thus not resized. Once that is done, open the MCC, unmount the /home partition and resize the /home partition, thus creating space for PClinuxOS. If you have important data on your /home partition, backup first. I never had problems with resizing partitons in Mandriva but who knows what might happen... Once you have finished that, create a new partition for PCLinuxOS (or two) and reboot in order to see if everything went well. If there are no problems, start installing PCLinuxOS on the new partition but skip the bootloader. Instead, add the information needed for booting the new Linux system to the already existing Mandriva bootloader and run "lilo -V" afterwards (grub does not require any reinitialization). If you need help with setting up the dual/triple-boot configuration, let us know and we will help you with that. Good luck. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
payasam Posted August 3, 2006 Report Share Posted August 3, 2006 Arctic, I'm generally happier working from the command line. Besides, I don't know what you mean by logging in as root. Things are set up so that I don't have to log in as anything. Will it not do to go straight into MCC? If I remember, that asks for the root password. As for backing up /home, I had in mind zipping everything and storing it on Windows D:. Adding PCLinuxOS to the Mandrake (or maybe it's called Linux) and the Windows on the MDV boot loader seems simple enough. Thank you. I may yell for a rope when I'm drowning. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted August 3, 2006 Report Share Posted August 3, 2006 If you have everything set up so that you don't need to log in, then I suggest to boot in failsafe mode and perform the steps described above once the failsafe mode is up and running. For the failsafe mode, type at the first prompt init 3 for defining the runlevel and then to type startx as root. The root = administrator log in is mandatory as the normal user account that you use by default actually uses the /home partition that you want to shrink and you cannot shrink a fully mounted partition. Root has his own "/home"directory outside of the normal /home partition for standard users, thus only root is able to resize the partition. In short: Boot in failsafe mode into init 3, run startx and run the MCC as root. Running the MCC from a normal user-account will not work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
payasam Posted August 3, 2006 Report Share Posted August 3, 2006 That seems straight enough, Arctic. I did wonder what a second /home was doing under root. It had occurred to me to see if I could do anything through the control panel of PCLOS, running live off a CD, which is identical to that of MDV; but I don't think that should now be needed. Thanks. Keep that rope handy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
payasam Posted August 3, 2006 Report Share Posted August 3, 2006 Here's what I got, Arctic: "error unmounting /home: Device or resource busy." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted August 3, 2006 Report Share Posted August 3, 2006 You might need to boot single-user mode to be able to unmount home, as init 3 would have this mounted. Section from the /etc/inittab file: # Default runlevel. The runlevels used by Mandrakelinux are: # 0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this) # 1 - Single user mode # 2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking) # 3 - Full multiuser mode # 4 - unused # 5 - X11 # 6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this) # id:5:initdefault: you could change the "5" in my example to "1", and then reboot. Or just type init 1, and then see if you can unmount home, and do what you need to do. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted August 3, 2006 Report Share Posted August 3, 2006 You can unmount the home partition with the MCC as root. When you click on the partition, there should be on the left side a box that says "unmount". It should work... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
payasam Posted August 3, 2006 Report Share Posted August 3, 2006 Arctic, I got the report I quoted after I had clicked on the "unmount" box at the left. Wondered where you were lurking, Ian. Now to try your medicine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted August 3, 2006 Report Share Posted August 3, 2006 Really, the only logical reason why this could not function is because you probably have only one partition for root and /home. What I suggested above will only work if you have two separate partitions set up. If you have only one partition, then you will have to use a live-CD with tools like qtparted or gparted for shrinking the partition (Knoppix, gparted-live,...). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted August 3, 2006 Report Share Posted August 3, 2006 you can't unmount /home if you're using /home...that is, if you're logged in as a user (not root) on the system. if you boot straight to a desktop then you are using automatic login, so you're logged in as a user Really, the best and easiest way to resize a partition is to grab a gparted livecd. With this you boot straight into a functioning instance of gparted, which is a GTK2 frontend to parted, which is quite possibly the best partition software for Linux and what most partition tools are based on ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
payasam Posted August 3, 2006 Report Share Posted August 3, 2006 Arctic, I have /dev/hda6 and /dev/hda8/home, both ext 3, as well as swap, which is /dev/hda7. This is apart from 1 and 5, Windows C: and D: respectively. Tyme, Arctic said, in post 4, his first to me here, exactly what you say about logging in automatically. In the failsafe, init 3, startx procedure of which he spoke, I could not log in as root and had to do that as a user. No progress, Ian. This I think is because I do not understand the sequence of actions, and the alternatives, indicated in your post. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted August 3, 2006 Report Share Posted August 3, 2006 Well, if you ran start as normal user, then it is logical that the /home partition gets used again. So I will try to explain it again. Maybe we can solve it then. :) The computer has several "levels" with which it can run, the so called init modes. The default for a Mandriva system is init 5 which will be loaded automatically and allow you to use your system as a normal user while init 3 is a reduced runlevel. In init 3 mode, you are able to change things by bypassing the auto-login feature that you have enabled on your machine. You booted in failsafe mode, launched init 3 and got to the prompt. Now at this prompt, you have to log in as root, the administrator account that you created when you set up the machine for the first time. If you want to log in as root, type root followed by the masked password. This is a bit different to a terminal where you type "su" and the password. Once you have done that, you can either use startx in order to get to the graphical environment and start the MCC from there or you can simply launch the MCC from the command line, but then it will be an ncurses layout = very basic "graphics" and selection options. You can unmount the /home partition manually as root if the MCC refuses to do so (it should work with the MCC). For that you would have to type umount /dev/hda8 or, if that reports an error on the filesystem umount -t ext3 /dev/hda8 after that, the MCC can shrink the partition. Remember: Once you log in as normal user, the /home partition will be mounted/used and thus cannot be unmounted. You need to be root. If you are still stuck, try gparted-live. The CD is self-explaining. ;) And keep us informed on your progress. Good luck. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.