Help please with regards to hardrive

English Hardware
#1

Hello

I have just dumped Windows XP in favour for Opensuse and I am slowly losing my patience with the software. Before formatting my drive with Opensuse I plugged in a second hardrive and backed everything onto it.

I then unplugged the second hardrive and installed Opensuse on the original hardrive.

Opensuse now works etc but when I plug the second harddrive in so that I can copy my work etc over to the original hardrive Opensuse does not pick it up. I did a hardware probe and it found the second hardrive. But how do I access the drive?

When you click computer the only status you get is of the original drive and not the second one.

What must I do to make this software work?
Any help would be appreciated. I need to get that second drive working before the end of tonight as I have a huge amount of exam work to do.

Thanks in advance
Mike

#2

Do you have an entry for the drive in fstab?

If not, you will need to create one and then use mount or the YaST partitioner to mount it.

(Removing the hard drive during installation meant that openSUSE could not do this for you automatically)

#3

Thank you for the quick reply. I had the drive unplugged whilst installing Opensuse.

How do you make an entry in the fstab? And how do I mount it?

By doing what you suggested will I lose the data on the second hardrive?

Nothing is ever simple :frowning:

#4
  1. Open the Yast Control Center.
  2. Click System
  3. Click Partitioner
  4. Click Yes
  5. Find your drive in the list and click on it.
  6. Click Edit
  7. Make sure “Do Not Format” is checked.
  8. In the Mount Point text box enter /mnt
  9. Click Fstab Options
  10. You will most likely want to use the default options
  11. Click OK
  12. Click OK
  13. Click OK

Note: The “Mount Point” area of the Yast setup can point to any directory on your hard drive. You could create a directory “/mnt/Backup” and put that in the Yast configuration and your second drive will be mounted there.

#5

The advice you received is for the most part very good and quite appropriate. However, if you mount an external drive via fstab just with the defaults as suggested, and you boot the computer on an occasion when the external drive is not attached, the computer will see that as an error situation and the booting will fail.

Also, if the external drive is NTFS, you can tweak the system to automount it read-write whenever it is plugged in, in the fashion of a windows operating system.

Really, the finer detail of how you go about this depends on the filesystem on the drive.