Mount a hard drive?

[Kirsle]

Hi, I'm new to Linux (actually right now I'm in the process of searching my house for my Windows XP key so I can finish reinstalling it, and so I'm on a Linux LiveCD right now)

I'm using the Kubuntu distribution of Linux.

When I open the "Storage Media" folder, I have these icons:

1.0K Media
35G Media
81G Media
Floppy Drive
PRESARIO_RP
Remote Share (unionfs)

The hard drives I had connected to my computer are a 40GB master drive and an 80GB slave drive, so I'm assuming that the 35G and 81G Media relate to these two drives (the PRESARIO_RP is a partition of my main drive that my previous installation of Windows XP used)

When I try to open the 81G Media drive, I get this error:

Could not mount device.

The reported error was:

mount: can't find /dev/hdb1 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

And when I right-click the icon and click "Mount" I get this error:

mount: can't find /dev/hdb1 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

Please check that the device is plugged correctly.

And I know that the hard drives are plugged correctly.

So, how do I access these hard drives? (and for that matter, where is Kubuntu keeping my data, its running from a LiveCD after all...)

 

[Kozusnik]

If it's a live cd, and you don't have a usb drive loaded, then it's not saving anything. All of your settings will be gone after a reboot.

If those drives are ntfs, I wouldn't try to change data on them. I'm not sure about Kubuntu's ntfs driver (it may be fine, I'm just cautious.)

That being said, the mount command might not be available without using sudo, or switching to root. I usually do something like...
sudo kuser
Change root's password
Open xterm or konsole
su
enter new root pw
mkdir /windrive
mount /dev/hdb1 /windrive

Or edit the /etc/fstab, then try again.

Mark

 

[Trevoke]

The mount command will search through the files /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab for directives on how to mount.
If it doesn't find it, it's an error.

So what you do is override it by using the command line, as Kozusnik indicated :

mount /dev/hdb1 /windrive

You simply need to specify *where* you want to mount the partition (You never, or very rarely, mount a whole drive. Always partitions.. That's the proper way to do it. Even if the partition is as big as the drive. Always partition the drive.)

"That time in Seattle... was a nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX."
"Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually exclusive."
-- Neal Stephenson, "Cryptonomicon"