Need help mounting a FAT filesystem

[squash]

I have a red hat Linux OS
Linux 2.4.7-10
I am attempting to mount a files system that is on a hard drive I formatted on a windows machine.
I have gnome running ( not so sure I like it as I am a SUNOS kinda guy).
In the system settings/hardware browser I see some thing like this

/dev/hdb
- 1 1 <1 Free space
-hdb1 1 14881 117246 FAT
- 15882 15882 <1 Free Space

So I now know that the OS/Bios sees the hard drive and has given it a name of /dev/hdb1
I created a directory called music on the root filesystem for a mount point.

In a terminal session window I have attempted a few commands to manually mount this filesystem. I am assuming that when I get the mount command correct I can update /etc/fstab so this filesystem will mount each time I boot.

Here are a couple of my attempts

[root@localhost /] mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /music
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /devhdb1,
or too many mounted file systems

[root@localhost /] mount /dev/hdb1 /music
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /devhdb1,
or too many mounted file systems

I have also tried msdos,umsdos,fat,and FAT, and yes I did look up the man pages which lists all the possible types, and although fat and FAT were not there i tried them because the hardware browsers lists the filesystem type as FAT. (see above).

Since this is a fairly new install I don't suspect too many mounted file systems, but I guess it could be, not sure how to check.

I will have other questions once I get this mounted, but I'll save that for a new thread.

Any light that can be shed would be great,

As always I thank you for your support

As always we thank you for your support
Doug

 

[thedaver]

I think you would want to allow for it possibly being NTFS type.

I think the easiest way to assure yourself would be to view what the OS thinks it is...

fdisk -l /dev/hdb

I assumed that your first section of output is using that same information, but this will help. I don't know if fat/vfat and NTFS will appear the same. Generally fdisk can tell the difference.

Conversely you could boot up the windows OS on that box and ask Windows what it thinks the partition type is.



D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[squash]

When I run fdisk -l /dev/hdb I see that the system thinks this is win95 fat32, so I am still at square one, or maybe I need to put this disk on a windows system and reformat to ntfs.

Or maybe, i need to find a better way to store files and give access to windows users.

I'll keep trying , thx

As always we thank you for your support
Doug

 

[pentode]

FAT devices are fully supported in Linux. NTFS is still read-only, I believe.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Mount_Windows_partitions_(DOS,_FAT,NTFS)

Link above is from Gentoo docs, but it should be the same in RedHat.

 

[squash]

I tried your link and got the page but no text in it.
So anyway still trying to mount this FAT filesystem on a linux machine, no luck


As always we thank you for your support
Doug

 

[pentode]

Try this, or just do a very specific Google search.

http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_80_3487.shtm