[SLUG] second hard disc not showing

[Stephen]

>I spotted, in the startup, that it sees both discs. But if I ls /mnt it
>shows two CDs, a floppy and a zip drive.
>
>If I use the hardware browser it shows me an hda with the three Linux bits
>hda1, 2 and 3, and an hdb which it says is fat32. Linux should see that
>shouldn't it?
>  
>

Here's my non-exhaustive, nor conclusive understanding of linux and 
drive mounting.

If you have multiple hard drives then they will be named in a similar 
way to how windows names drives - in mine my first hard drive is named 
'hda', my second 'hdb'.

If you have multiple partitions in each drive then they are numbered 
accordingly. As windows is on my primary drive I have 'hda1, hda2' as my 
windows partitions and 'hdb1, hdb2, hdb3' as my linux ones.

As you said, you can see 'hdb' in fat format. This means that linux has 
seen the drive.

In order for linux to use it you need to mount it. This is the thing 
that made my head whirr a little on switching. Everything in linux 
appears to reside in the same sort of logical filesystem. In windows you 
may have c: , d: , e: etc... however in linux it appears that you mount 
all drives to being subdirectories of '/'. A convenient place to mount 
drives is into '/mnt' as that keeps things in the same place, however 
they could afaik be anywhere.

To mount:

1) Create a directory in which you want the contents of hdb1 (or 
whatever the number of the fat drive) to appear - 'e.g. /mnt/drive2'.
2) As root, and assuming that you want the drive to be available in the 
same mountpoint when you reboot, edit '/etc/fstab' and add the line:
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/drive2 vfat users,owner,ro,umask=000 0 0
3) At the terminal, as root type 'mount -a'

This should then mount /dev/hdb* at /mnt/drive2 ...

Sorry for the lack of detail as to what's going on - I don't really 
know, but hopefully that will at least work until one of the oracles can 
fill us in ;)

Also, I have a magazine article going through the linux fs which you may 
like to squint at some time.

Steve