Sharing a FAT32 partiton with Red Hat 8

[Astrotolus]

I have set up a dual boot with XP and Hed Hat 8. In addition to an NTFS partition, I have also made a FAT32 partition under XP where I have put my mp3's. My intention was to share the partition with RH8 so I can play the mp3's in this OS.

Well, I have followed the directions in the Red Hat Manual, but I can't manage to share the FAT32 with RH8.

I tried editing fstab by adding the line:
"dev/hda1/mnt/windows vfat auto,owner,users, 0,0" but when RH8 is loading I get an error saying that the mounting of the partiton has failed.

I also tried typing at a shell prompt "mkdir /mnt/windows" and then "mount -t vfat /dev/hda1/mnt/windows" but nothing seems to happen after typing this last line. I mean the "windows" directory is there but there is nothing in it.

What am I doing wrong"

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks.

[MaXimum SMOKE]

My guess is you are missing a space. The space is used as a seperator

mount /dev/hda1 (PUT THE SPACE HERE) /mnt/windows

Lastly remember case is important. ....
/mnt/windows is not the same as /mnt/Windows or /mnt/WINDOWS

The mounting point as you have guessed must be valid /mnt/windows must pre-exist as a valid directory

Does this cure the problem?

[Astrotolus]

I did have spaces in there, I just didn't type them in my question.

Someone else told me I needed to use hda2 ( or 3 or 4), because the FAT32 partition is the first etended partition on the master IDE, when I changed hda1 to hda2 I got another error when loading RH. It said that the mount failed and also "Aren't you trying to mount an extended partition instead of a logical partition instead"

Hmmm, how do I get the first extended partition on IDE1 master?

[MaXimum SMOKE]

Here's the scoop. 1st physical ide drive is /dev/hda The 1st primary partition is hda1. The 1st non-primary is hda5. A drive can contain up to 4 primary partitions. It can have many non-primary partitions. Non primary partitions start at number 5 and go up. So if you have 3 non-primaries you have hda1,(the primary *bootable partition) hda5, hda6, and hda7. Now just to confuse things.... When you start creating those non-primay partitions (5 and up), a primary partition, in this case hda2 is created by the partition program to hold the rest of the partitions.... So depending upon when the Fat32 partition was created.... It could be hda5, or higher. That's the partition you want to mount. Open a shell (terminal window) in linux, and type df into it, you should be able to see your partition data. Other idea in linux is to open a shell and start the fdisk program and use it to see the partition information. Other would be to (in kde), open the control panel and use the information section to view your partitions graphically.

[Astrotolus]

Thanks MaXimum SMOKE for that info. I really needed to know that.

I'll try using hda5, to mount the FAT32 partition.

[mindwave_21]

Let us know how it turned out, as I'm trying to do the same with SuSE 8.1

[Astrotolus]

Thanks, MaXimum SMOKE, it worked. I can get to the mp3's in the FAT32 partition.

The problem is, I can only play one song using the audio player, the one that looks like WinAmp from windows. The file it can play happens to be an Ogg Vorbis file with an .oog extension. I looked in the preferences of the program but I can't find how how to play .mp3 files. Any ideas?

Also I downloaded another audio player to see if it can play the other files, but then remembered that I need to compile it myself. Can you explain how to do this?

Thanks for the help.

[MaXimum SMOKE]

RedHat 8 (Just out of the box) has a problem with mp3 support. There was a licensing concern. RH can be modified. You can find info here:
http://www.xmms.org/

http://staff.xmms.org/priv/redhat8/

http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_80mm.html

Pretty much explains it and the solutions.

Hopefully this will be corrected in the future ;)