Subject: Re: Newbee Question
From: Patrick Callahan (pac1@tiac.net)
Date: Sat Jan 15 2000 - 17:48:03 MST
Since both drives presumably still have ext2 file systems on them, you can
simply mount them as part of your operating filesystem
Linux operates with a single hierarchy for all files, and uses the mount
command and the contents of /etc/fstab to determine which devices and
partitions on those devices to attach where. The root partition / should
be the installed linux you are running, the others are attached to mount
points under /. you create a mount point by simply creating an empty
directory. Any linux directory can be used as a mount point, but if the
directory has files in it you wont be able to see them while the directory
is being used to mount a partition.
Here's what I do.
I have a disk with a bunch of partitions on it. It doesn't matter that
its one disk and not four. for our purposes, its disk partitions that get
mounted, not the whole disks themselves.
My partitions are all on sda
sda5 is hfs and is used to exchange files between macos and linux.
sda 6 is ext2
sda 7 I'm using for swap
sda 8 is ext2
sda 9 is ext2
Each of the ext2 partitions has a different version of linux and/or linux
software versions installed in it. I can boot into
any of the three from bootx by switching the root device entry between
sda6, sda8 or sda9.
Once booted into linux, depending on which root device entry I chose I'll
end up with one of the three partitions mounted as /
ls / will show the usual top level directories for that particular
installation of Linux.
Now in order to mount the other partitions, for each one you need to
provide two things:
1. A directory to mount the partition under
2. Either a command to mount the partition in the chosen directory or an
entry in /etc/fstab to mount the partition as part of the boot processing.
The linux I'm using is in sda6, so /etc/fstab is really
/dev/sda6/etc/fstab since I want to mount the other partitions, I need a
directory for each partition. I chose to name mine simply /8 and /9, and
I used the commands:
mkdir /exchange
mkdir /8
mkdir /9
to create the directories for mounting the partitions.
Then, I added lines to /etc/fstab for each of the partitions, assigning
them to mount as /8 and /9
/dev/sda5 /exchange defaults 0 0
/dev/sda8 /8 ext2 defaults 0 0
/dev/sda9 /8 ext2 defaults 0 0
You can add these lines using cat >>/etc/fstab, followed by the two lines,
followed by a ctrl/d
or you can use an editor to add them.
If you're like me and have linux in more than one partition, do something
similar with the remaining partitions. For example if you booted and had
sda9 as the / partition, you would want /6 and /8 directories and
/etc/fstab entries.
If you don't have linux in the additional partitions, you can still mount
them anywhere you want.
Sometimes, I want to be able to look at materials in a partition other
than the one I just booted and mounted as /
When I'm using sda6 as /, I have created directories /8 and /9 and I've
added lines to /etc/fstab in the sda6 ext2 filesystem which automatically
mount /8 and /9 as sda8 and sda9
I've done a similar thing to each of the other file systems.
Roy Koch wrote:
> I have another newbee question! I have changed the drive I boot Linux
> on, I now want to use the other drive I was using. The drive I am
> booting on now is sda5 my older drive I want to use as a extra drive is
> sdb5?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Tue Feb 01 2000 - 17:50:57 MST