Second hard drive not recognized in Mandriva 2006

[Clitheroe]

Hello, everyone.

 

I'm a Mandriva newbie. I have formatted my second hard drive in Mandriva and want it to go under 'Devices' on the KDE desktop, so that I can just click on it to have access to it to store files. Whatever I do, and whichever mount point I choose, I just can't get this drive to 'show-up' anywhere so that I can use it.

 

It would appear to be the simplest thing to do, but having made the switch from Windows because I don't like many aspects of that operating system - I have to say such a task is a piece of cake on that OS. If anyone can help, I would be grateful.

 

David.

[AussieJohn]

Welcome to MUB.

The 2nd hard drive needs to be mounted before you can see it.

Open Mandriva Control Centre and click on Mount Points then on Create, delete and resize hard disk partitions.

There you will see the hard drive listed then just follow the routine from there. When you close out of MCC and open Konqueror you will be able to find your Hard drive listed with the partition name you gave it when in MCC.

 

Hope this helps. John.

[Clitheroe]

Hi, John.

 

Thanks for the welcome, and I appreciate your help. I finally got the drive mounted where I wanted it in 'Konqueror' - yipeeee, I thought - finally cracked it! However, I cannot access the drive due to not having the right 'permissions' apparently.

 

I have tried going into a terminal and using the 'chmod 777' command, but I'm not sure of the syntax. Do you or anyone else know exactly what I would have to type in the terminal window to allow read & write access to all users - or failing that, myself, 'david'.?

 

Cheers,

 

David.

[ianw1974]

The problems with accessing the drive aren't with chmod, but the mount options. Normally, you need to use "umask=0" to ensure you get full read/write access rights.

 

What's the partition information? I need to know if it's /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdb2 and the filesystem type, then I can help you add the information to your /etc/fstab file to ensure it's automatically mounted each time you start your system.

[Gowator]

Ianw is correct, its usually the mount point (the place you create to mount) OR the mount permissions of the mount that cause problems for this... or even mounting ro by default etc. however since you want to do this from the CLI and since sooner or later its going to be useful for you...

 

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?s=&...st&p=120271

 

For the GUI you can also use krusador which is a beefed up konqueror .. the nice thing is it has a root mode you can just switch into at any point and just as importantly back to usermode.. and has a load of utilities like mounting and disk usage and edit as root which fires up an editor as root... on a selected file according to its type (i.e. text, zip, etc.)

 

Its not an app to replace konqeror IMHO... since its so much more powerful at file management, its more of an app to fire up when you are doing nitty gritty stuff... or certain things where you don't want your user to have permissions ... for instance when I edit my web server I don't like having to switch permissions or giving my user permissions .. sooner or later you forget and end up leaving a configuration.php open etc. so its ideal for these types of things...

 

Equally you can make a kdesu konqueror in your menu...

 

finally a nice feature in konq is it accepts the man:/ protocol so you can type

man:/ chmod and it gives you the man page for chmod :D

 

hope any or all of this helps....

[Clitheroe]

The problems with accessing the drive aren't with chmod, but the mount options. Normally, you need to use "umask=0" to ensure you get full read/write access rights.

 

What's the partition information? I need to know if it's /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdb2 and the filesystem type, then I can help you add the information to your /etc/fstab file to ensure it's automatically mounted each time you start your system.

 

Right, many thanks, Ian, Gowater and John. Sorry, I'm a total newbie to Linux, so bear with me. My partition information is: /device/hdb1 (this is the 'mount point' I have used in MCC's disk partitionong section).

 

I notice under 'mount options' that there is no option to use "unmask=0" for the drive (hdb1) - this option simply does not exist! I find this odd, because if I look under 'mount options' re: my external disk drive - "unmask=0" is clearly visable and can be selected as an option.

 

I formatted the drive I want to use (hdb1) in 'ext 3', I hope this is correct. I'm really stumped on this one now, so I hope you can help me. I never thought something so simple as formatting a second hard drive so that it can be used for saving data to could ever be so complicated.

 

Cheers,

 

David.

 

Edit: Would I have had to create a swap file for this drive? All I have done is formatted the entire drive in 'ext 3'.

[ianw1974]

No, no need for swap, you can post the contents of /etc/fstab for us so we can take a look, and add the option where you need it. Do:

 

cat /etc/fstab

 

and copy and paste here.

[Gowator]

David,

I'm not using Mandriva so can't really massively help with the Mandriva partitioning and mounting tool except to say if I remember there is an advanced button to press (least wise last time I tried).... its not exactly overly visible ... from what I remember :D

 

As a tip.. you can't actually change anything while the drive (or more accurately partition) is mounted ....

 

From what yuo say Im presuming you have mandriva installed on your hda1 (primary master or what would be C: by default in Windows) so this shouldn't represent a problem...

 

Swapfile config....

Well you don't need a per drive swap file... indeed you don't *need* a swap file at all... but in general its a good idea... (linux gets bvery peeved when it runs out of memory)

 

Performance wise its best to have the swap on a DIFFERENT drive to the one you are using as the root partition (all other things being equal) since then you can read from one wile writing to the other... but this is not important in general... you can also have more than one swap file... and actually give them priorities .. again advanced stuff

 

 

For mounting... whatever tool you use... its manipulating the mount options...

This can be done two ways in linux ...

Firstly one off you can mount any device as a one off from the CLI specificying any options...

mount /dev/hdb1 /media/hdb1 -rw -U <uuid>, -t <vfstype>

<uuid is a user ID what you get if you type id as your user>

<vfstype is the filesystem type like ext3> this is optional but recommended otherwise mount guesses the filesystem type (so for critical stuff its best to be specific)

 

-o

Options are specified with a -o flag followed by a comma separated string of options. Some of these options are only useful when they appear in the /etc/fstab file. The following options apply to any file system that is being mounted (but not every file system actually honors them - e.g., the sync option today has effect only for ext2, ext3 and ufs):

 

so from here you get the options to put into the /etc/fstab file

This is the second way to mount in linux... or more accuratly its a list of the options you want to put into mount... so for instance you can use mount -a or mount -a -t nfs etc.... and similarly with unmount

 

For example if you set up -o rw,users then a normal user can mount/unount which is sometimes convenient

Anything which is default or not explicitly -noauto is mouinted with the mount -a command

This is what happens each time you boot anyway so adding the entry to fstab means it will be automatically mounted by (default root unless you specify user) this doesn't prevent you read/writing... just who can unmount it...

 

So...

/dev/hdb1 /media/hdb1 ext3 users, rw

should give you a flexible option...

If you make sure the /media/hdb1 directory where it will be mounted can be rw from the user

 

the simplest (and insecure but you can worry about this later) way is just chmod 777 /media/hdb1

It must be unmounted when you do this or it will fail (and say why)

as root

umount /dev/hdb1 (will accomplish this)

 

 

p.s. You are asking good questions.... if/when you need more detail just ask :D but you will get the best answers with smart questions like your asking...

[Clitheroe]

Thanks, Ian.

 

Here is the out put from my fstab file:

 

[david@localhost ~]$ su

Password:

[root@localhost david]# cat /etc/fstab

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details

/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1

/dev/hda6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2

/dev/sda5 /mnt/External_Disk ntfs pamconsole,exec,noauto,utf8,iocharset=iso8859-15,managed 0 0

/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0

/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0

none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850 0 0

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 ext3 umask=0,defaults 1 2

none /proc proc defaults 0 0

/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

[root@localhost david]#

[ianw1974]

The parameters you have already should be OK. You shouldn't normally need umask=0 unless it's a removable drive/device anyway. So defaults should suffice.

 

If you only have one user on your system, then a nice easier way is to do this:

 

su (enter root password when prompted)
cd /mnt/hdb1
chown -R username:username *

 

what this will do is change ownership of all files on your second hard disk to the username you specify. Of course, change username to whatever you like.

 

However, I might be tempted to do this:

 

mkdir /data

 

create data directory, and change /etc/fstab, so that it mounts /dev/hdb1 to /data instead of /mnt/hdb1. Just for nice easy stuff really and neatness, then you can use the whole disk for data. Then do:

 

chown username:username -R /data

 

and reset the directory to your user. Change username to david, or whatever user you want to give access. Then you can install all your files in /data.