HDD Install great, Few general questions please?

I did the hd install last night and it was the simplest OS install I have done since DOS itself. Kudos to the authors on this one.

I will be content to learn my way around linux with library books and the usual poke and hope methods, but I would like to ask a question about mounting other file systems, and general drive usage. I can't decide what forum to ask this in, but I really don't want to join 12 mailing lists and html through a ton of other pages, so with fingers crossed:.......

Does the Debian Kernel support FAT and FAT32 as compiled in the knoppix install? I tried to mount a drive and it said FAT was not supported.......

I created a 2G partition and formatted it FAT to use as a "buffer" for files going back and forth between systems, as I don't feel good about writing to other partitions(Win2K and OS/2) so this will be where I dump stuff to share.

My fstab file does not show this partition, so I am lost as to how to get Debian to see the partition so that I can mount it. I would rather learn on this scratch partition than go screwing up the rest of my system.

I know I have much to learn, but I appreciate any help I can get here.

Thanks much for any assistance.

John

I've always found linux very capeable of reading FAT and FAT32 partitions. Linux calls modern FAT filesystems vfat, however you shouldn't need to specify it. Assuming your new partition is hda3 (use cfdisk to check), make a directory in /mnt called buffer or something (mkdir /mnt/buffer) and call:

mount /dev/hda3 /buffer

If that works okay then you should be able to add it to your fstab, just like the other windows partitions.

btw, if you're having trouble with a command, try man <command>, it will usuallly help!

Good Luck

Laurence

run Konsole
$ su
# rebuildfstab

edit the new fstab :
# mcedit /etc/fstab,
assuming your new FAT is hda3, and there is a line at /etc/fstab like this :
/dev/hda3 /mnt/hda3 vfat auto,users,exec,umask=000,uid=knoppix,gid=knoppix 0 0

replace "/mnt/hda3" with say /transit, don't forget to create /transit :
# mkdir /transit

after that
# mount -o rw /dev/hda3 /transit