Any way to mount and chroot a entire hard drive?

[Rootman]

For example, i have this right now:

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1         853     6851691    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2             854        7860    56283727+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda3            7861       14946    56918295    5  Extended
/dev/hda5            7861       12115    34178256   83  Linux
/dev/hda6           12116       14824    21760011   83  Linux
/dev/hda7           14825       14946      979933+  82  Linux swap

Am i able to do the following after booting from the knoppix cd?:

% mount /dev/hda /mnt/hda5
% chroot /mnt/hda5

I did try it, but i get some kind of 'bad superblocks or too many filesystems mounted error'.

I am able to mount partitions separately and chroot into them, like /dev/hda5, or /dev/hda6. Was wondering if i could do the whole drive as /dev/hda.

Thanks.

/edit: a thought just occured to me. It might be because of the windows partitions that it won't let me mount the whole drive. Am i right?

You are right in thinking /dev/hda is the ENTIRE drive but it cannot be mounted, only the filesystems under it.

In order to accomplish thiis you should mount the filesystem that holds the Linux system you are changing to - which looks like maybe it's /dev/hda5. Make sure you mount /dev/hda5 as a RW partition on the base system, chroot to it (i.e. chroot /mnt/hda5).

Now modify the chrooted Linux systems /etc/fstab file to mount the partitions under the new chrooted environment and issue the command

mount -a

This will mount all the partitions listed in the chrooted Linux's /etc/fstab.