Mounting a fat32 partition

[ubenpdon]

Running red hat 9.0
booted into kde
Hey there, im trying to mount my hard drive as told to me in a help file on this site. I edited fstab and put this line in it
/dev/hdb /mnt/winxp auto defaults 0 0
hdb is where the drive i want to load is and its my winxp drive, that i recent converted to fat32 using part. magic 8.0
i have also created the winxp folder in /mnt
then i right clicked on the desktop selected new and then selected hard drive.
went into that and changed the drive to use /dev/hdb
tried to mount it and got an error that you must define the file system or something like that...
what do i need to change?
im a 100% new to linux, but im pretty damn good on windows based systems

[Daedrus]

type should be listed as vfat

fstab entry should look something like:

/dev/hdb /mnt/winxp vfat defaults 0 0

[ubenpdon]

i think i tried that before but ill try it again...
it usually says wrong filesystem...

[ubenpdon]

this is the error message i get

Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb,
or too many mounted file systems
the master boot record is also messed up on that drive because i was trying to dual boot, but im not sure if that would relate to this problem.

[Icarus]

The MBR doesn't matter at all

the correct format to use in fstab is

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/winxp vfat defaults 0 0

note: that it's hdb1 not hdb ;)

Also you can mount it as root with

mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /mnt/winxp

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by ubenpdon
that i recent converted to fat32 using part. magic 8.0 PM 8.0 may be different from previous versions, but previous versions wouldn't actually do conversion of the filesystem. They'd only change the partition table.

Might this be part of the issue? Does it work to make it try to mount as ntfs rather than vfat?

Though if PM 8.0 does actually reformat the partition, then this isn't the problem...

[ubenpdon]

Cool, looks like that worked for the mounting.. Thanks alot for your help!

[bwkaz]

You won't be able to write to an ntfs filesystem, though. If you want it mounted read-write, you'll have to actually reformat it as FAT32...