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[PLUG] Re: Newbie's first question - chose to install [hard drive(s)]
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"George Langford, Sc.D." wrote:
>
> Hello fellow PLUGgers !
>
> Here I was, resigned to learning how to mount a mess of botched
> partitions from W9[5 & 8] boxes in my Linux PC, and Kevin pipes
> up with, "... just mount one partition at a time ..."
>
> Yup; it works.
>
Excellent! I'm glad I could help and this did what you wanted.
> Here's what I did. First, I yanked the drives, one at a time,
> and starting with the one of least importance, made sure (heh,
> heh) that they were jumpered as slaves, and plugged 'em in to
> the Linux PC, using the CDWriter's IDE cable & power supply
> connector. I then booted up (from the boot floppy - not yet
> sure if this matters) and stopped at the BIOS settings to check
> that the device was detected (every time, almost), saved those
> new BIOS settings, and then read off the partition table with
> Hardware Browser. Then I used Konsole to mount the partitions
> (one at a time, per Kevin's advice) with the simple command:
>
> mount /dev/hdbX /mnt
>
> where X is the number of the partition I wanted. I also used
> Konsole to create a destination directory. Then I used two
> copies of Kommander to perform the select, copy & paste functions.
>
> About two hours, 5GB and 30,000 files later, I am out of files
> to copy and the Linux PC had only choked once, when the cursor
> vanished for no apparent reason after I closed all the open
> menus.
>
> Naturally, I followed Kevin's advice to unmount each partition
> before proceeding to the next one without fail, so I did not
> find out what happens when one leaves a partition mounted before
> changing to another hard drive. Whew. I did find out that
> Konsole does not like to unmount a partition while Kommander
> has it in use. That was easily corrected by closing the
> unneeded copies of Kommander.
The way you were doing it, all you would get was an error message about
/mnt already being in use. You needed to umount so you could re-use the
'mount point'. The only time you need to be really concerned about
umount'ing is when using removable media like floppies. If you manually
mount, write some files to the floppy, and then pull the floppy; it's
possible to not have all the file information written out yet. A
umount, in this case, would write all info to the disk before returning.
>
> The only real hitch was that I could not do anything with a
> couple of file systems called "Extended" by Hardware Browser.
> The automatic detection of file_system works great for FAT,
> but not for Extended, it seems. At least for me, the neophyte.
>
That's to be expected. I think of the 'extended' partition as a
container for the other high numbered partitions. So, for example from
your case:
/dev/hdb1 /? FAT ?
? ?
/dev/hdb3 /? FAT ?
? ?
/dev/hdb2 /? FAT ?
? ?
/dev/hdb4 /? Extended ?
? ?
/dev/hdb7 /? ext 2 ?
? ?
/dev/hdb6 /? ext 2 ?
? ?
/dev/hdb5 /? linux swap ?
? ?
/dev/hdb8 /? FAT ?
? ?
The hdb4 partition is most likely sized such that it contains all the
disk space for partitions 5-8. So you never need to mount it directly.
It's a container for those other mountable partitions. (This has to do
with an early limitation on number of partitions in the table. You can
only have 4 primary partitions, so to get additional partitions on a
disk the 'extended' partition type was added.)
--
Kevin
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