Mounting Partitions

If you have followed the instructions exactly, or roughly, then you will probably have some Windows partitions. In order to use these from Linux, they need to be mounted. This can be done every time that they are needed but this is a bit of pain, so I have them mounted automatically.

To mount the partitions, we need somewhere to mount them, so I created two new directories underneath the root: /xpsystem and /shared.

In order to mount the partitions automatically, the /etc/fstab file must be modified. I used vi, you might have something else available but I doubt it at this stage. In no way can I teach vi here! There was one modification I made, and two new entries. I modified the entry for the cdrom so that all users can unmount a CD regardless of who mounted it in the first place. To do this change user to users.

The following lines were added:

/dev/hda1 /xpsystem ntfs noexec,nouser,ro,auto,nodev,async,umask=0222 0 0
/dev/hda2 /shared vfat noexec,nouser,rw,auto,nodev,async,umask=000,quiet 0 0

Note that there should be tab characters between the different sections but no spaces between the commas. To find out about the options look at man mount

Once this has been done, and you have rebooted, it should be possible to list the /shared and /xpsystem directories. The /xpsystem is read only, so you will not be able to update it.