[Re: Mounting troubles]

Matt Graham danceswithcrows@usa.net
21 Sep 2001 15:44:06 EDT


"Daniel R . Kilbourne" <drk@voyager.net> wrote:

> hda1 is my Windows partition, hda2 is /, and hda3 is the extended 
> partition (not sure why it's labeled Win95) that contains the rest of my 
> linux partitions. The problem is that I want to mount hda4 as a shared 
> data partition. MOUNT says "wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on 
> /dev/hda4, or too many mounted file systems." I don't understand this - 
> the file system is fine as win98 mounts it with no problems. If you can 
> think of anything I can do to make this work, PLEASE let me know.


>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda1   *         1      2434  19551073+   c  Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
> /dev/hda2          2435      2473    313267+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda3          2474      3571   8819685    f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
> /dev/hda4          3572      4865  10394055    c  Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
[snip]

This is strange.  In many cases, when you have 2 primary FAT partitions under
Win9x, things will not work correctly on the Windows side.  Your Linux/BSD
partitions will show up as "phantom drives", data can be written to the wrong
area of a drive, and hideous filesystem corruption can occur. Partition tables
generated with FDISK.EXE will create partitions beyond the first one as
logical partitions instead of primary ones (unless you push FDISK, of
course.)

The command "mount -v -t vfat /dev/hda4 /mnt/somewhere" executed as root
followed by a "dmesg | tail -30" may produce more useful information.  It
could be that Linux and 'Doze are disagreeing on where the actual start of
/dev/hda4 is, and the beginning of the FAT filesystem is not where Linux is
expecting it to be.  

BTW, it is not wise to mount a non-native filesystem as /home even if this is
a single-user system, and it's *TOTALLY* unsuitable for a multi-user system. 
FAT lacks support for file permissions, symlinks, and special files.  If
something like X or xmms wants to create a socket in ~, it will fail miserably
and cause you pain.  FAT's handling of files like .bashrc could also cause
problems.  Mount /dev/hda4 somewhere else with the option umask=000 if you're
not worried about security, and if you must, make a symlink from your ~ to the
place where it's mounted.


-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
"I backed up my brain to tape, but tar says the tape contains no data...."