Command line mounting of hard drive [SOLVED]

[Henry Jones]

Long story short.

The internal drives had to be manually mounted each time.

I found a nifty program to auto mount them.

Assorted messages on boot of 'drive not ready' press "s" to skip or "m" for manual mounting".

I went back in and removed the 'auto mount' check, and checked the "allow manual mounting".

Now I need the command line instructions to mount sda1 or "Main" so I can correct my mistakes.....

Or at least get the primary drive to boot.

Dual boot, Lisa12 (64 bit)and Windows Vista 64bit.

Thank you for any help.

[viking777]

Those messages are indicative of errors in /etc/fstab which you will have to correct manually before you can boot again. You don't make it clear, but I presume you no longer are able to boot your computer, so you will have to work from a live dvd/usb key. In the live distro mount the hard drive by clicking its icon then look for it's address in a file manager. It will be /media/somenumber Open a terminal and type

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cat /media/somenumber/etc/fstab

and

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sudo fdisk -l

Post the results and we will see if we can go from there.

I hope I don't have to explain that 'somenumber' is not a proper part of the command, it requires you to substitute the correct number before you run it.

[Henry Jones]

I apologize for the delay in responding.

I do have Puppy up and running booted from a CD.

The fstab file for the drive I cannot boot from is here:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=86fc927d-ff66-4a61-8435-ea86f06e6f9d / ext4 noauto,user 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=73e3e49c-4d80-41a5-97cf-359d29cbda6a none swap noauto,sw,user 0 0
/dev/sdb3 /media/Main Drive ntfs nls=iso8859-1,umask=000 0 0
/dev/sdb3 /root ntfs nls=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/sdd2 /media/sdd2 ntfs nls=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1 ntfs nls=iso8859-1,ro,noauto,umask=000,owner 0 0
/dev/sdb2 /media/sdb2 ntfs nls=iso8859-1,noauto,umask=000,owner 0 0

The terminal commands kept coming up "file not found or does not exist"

Somewho I didn;t think posting that for your amusement would be appropriate. I do appreciate the help I get. Too bad you don't live next door...;=}

[viking777]

IF the information you have given me is correct (and not something created by Puppy) then these commands should mount the drives for you:

For the sda drive (which may be the only one you actually need to use to get the machine booted)

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sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/sda5 /

and for sdb drive

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sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1
sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb2 /media/sdb2

sdb3 is a complete mess, it has two mount points, one of which has a space in it which linux won't accept and the other is called /root a directory which linux already creates and thus will lead to massive confusion. For the moment press 's' to skip mounting this partition and when you have the others going you will have to try and sort it out from there. The present situation is completely unworkable.

For the sdd drive

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sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdd2 /media/sdd2

See how you get on with those.

[Henry Jones]

I just know that you are planning a trip to the woodshed, and I'm going to be the guest of honor....

Here is the latest "/etc/fstab" file:

*********************************************

/dev/sdb3 /media/Main Drive ntfs nls=iso8859-1,umask=000 0 0
UUID=73e3e49c-4d80-41a5-97cf-359d29cbda6a swap swap sw 0 0
UUID=86fc927d-ff66-4a61-8435-ea86f06e6f9d / ext4 defaults 0 1

***********************************************
I removed the USB drives so there is just the one drive with the two visible partitions and the extended partition w/two partitions.

Once I understood that the "/etc/" is a folder, and the "fstab" is a text file, life got better.

Now I can see what the commands do.

I am back into Mint12, but the drives still do not auto mount, but I can live with it.

I used a program named "MountManager" in an attempt to have the internal drives automount and that's where things went South. I re-entered MountManager to try to change it back... but... that didn't work out so well.

Now when i boot to Mint, I get 'disk not ready or missing, press "S" to skip or "M" for manual'.

I appreciate the education.

What lines do I need to alter to correct the problem?

sdb3 is the Windows/Mint dual boot drive.

[viking777]

I'm glad you are back into Mint 12.

I believe as I said before that the problem with your sdb3 drive is that it is named in a way that Linux will not accept.

I suggest you rename the drive from 'Main Drive' to 'Main_Drive' which you can do from the disk utility gparted simply by right clicking on the drive and selecting 'Rename'.

You will then have to edit /etc/fstab to look like this:

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/dev/sdb3 /media/Main_Drive ntfs nls=iso8859-1,umask=000 0 0


And rename the folder in /media from 'Main Drive' to 'Main_Drive'.

Both of these you can do from a root file manager which you can launch with

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sudo nautilus


From a terminal.

As an aside your fstab entry 'nls=iso8859-1' is completely unknown to me so if my suggested edits didn't work I would try without that unless you definitely know what it does, because I don't.

Two other things you should bear in mind Henry, my answers are not infallible, I try my best of course, but I could easily be wrong, and secondly Mint 12 ends its support cycle next month.

[altair4]

I hope you don't mind the interruption and my offer of some unsolicited advice but you need to stop using mountmanager.

Ubuntu seems to be going through a period of repo purging and has already removed PySDM from the latest release because of the damage it can cause. I suspect it's only a matter of time before mountmanager, ntfs-config, and others are also removed for the same reason.

/dev/sdb3 /media/Main Drive ntfs nls=iso8859-1,umask=000 0 0

Even in the days when something like "/dev/sdb3" was used instead of a UUID number that is not the correct syntax to mount a partition. Mountmanager seems to be creating the mount point by using the Label of the partition, forgetting there is a space in the name, and not dealing with it appropriately.

[Henry Jones]

Never a problem with additional help.

My wife keeps telling me that I'm beyond help, and this gives me something to point to as proof that it's not me, she just doesn't try hard enough.

Please don't tell her I said that... she knows where I sleep....