It seemed easy enough in that I have a new HDD with 2 partitions that I am trying to mount and I am doing it by editing /etc/fstab
sda 736GB
sdb 19.5GB
I have tried a few things by editing fstab with mixed results and won’t bore you with what I have done so far, and these questions might help me figure this out.
1st. Is the folder “lost+found” associated with a partition or drive ?
2nd. Do I need to have a separate directory for each partition mounted ?
3rd. Does a mount point actually create a file that I can see ?
4th. Can I have the same mount directory for more than one partition ?
For example, these 2 partitions are going into a folder I created as root.
None of both. It belongs to the file system that is created on the partition.
Of course. Technicaly you can mount more file systems on the same directory, but only the last one mounted would be visible. Thus it is normaly nonsense to do so.
I do not undestand you here. A directory (every directory) can act as a mount point. That directory is normaly empty because as soon as you mount, all that was already in that directory becomes unavailable (same as question #1 above). But you can create a file in there when you like. I have e.g. a file named “fs-not-mounted” in a directory that is normaly used as a mount point. Thus when I do an ls of that directory when the fs is not mounted, I see that file (which then should alert me). When the mount is active, I will of course see the contents of the fs.
Isn’t that the same as #1 above? Or do I completely misunderstand you?
This is indeed something that you should try. The second entry will make all that is mounted on the first entry unavailable/invisible.
Please take some time to understand the link about disks, partitions, file systems and mount points I gave you earlier. It is realy not that difficult:
you have a mass storage device (called disk for short after the revolving hardware that is still much used, but the same is true for sticks, memory cards. SSDs, etc.);
you can, for convenience, (but you must not) divide the amount of space there into pieces, where each of these pieces can be treated on the same level as the complete disk, these pieces are called partitions;
either the whole device, or the partitions are only containers. You can use them for all sorts of things. Often so called File Systems are put on them. Those are an organised way to offer files to the users. In other words, the users see a directory tree with files, not the file system, not the partitions, not the disks.
Unix/Linux has (contrary to several other operating systems like MS-DOS) only one directory tree, starting at /. That directory tree is formed from a least one file system (the root file system, often also called / for short) and maybe more file systems. Those additional file systems are hung/mounted into the already existing directory tree at a so called mount point, which is (as said) an existing directory. An example is of course /home. It means that a separate file system, in a separate container (partition) is starting it’s contents from the existing directory /home. Same you can mount another amount of space (file system) on e.g. /home/henk/Music/Jazz/.
My concept of what a mount does was totally wrong, hence my confusion. In light of your explanation, what you say makes sense.
And that makes some of my questions stupid.
i am glad you got somethinh here. It is often difficult to get a message through in a medium like these forums. We being separated by time, distance and knowledge of background information. Talking face to face with e beer or a tea would make all this much easier
Neither is true.
Both Windows and Linux so not need Extended Partitions per se.
But a disk with an old-style (MS-DOS, not GPT) partition table can only have 4 partitions (Primary Partitions).
If you want/need more than 4 partitions, you have to create one of them as an Extended Partition, which is just a container for more partitions.
On 2013-11-10 23:06, paulparker wrote:
>
> Noticed after a clean install the partitions were created without an
> Extended Partition, and operates fine.
>
> So are the Extended Partitions required for MS-Windows and NOT Linux ?
No, you got it wrong. It does not depend on the operating system.
History.
Originally, disks had no partitions. Then they defined a partition
table, which is a table with four entries. Thus we had disks with four
partitions, which was thought enough.
But soon we needed more. There were two solutions: redefine a bigger
partition table with more entries; problem is that it would not be
compatible, things would break. Another was to use a partition to
contain more partitions defined some other way.
The solution was to create a “fake” partition. This partition has the
size of the rest of the disk, and it would contain inside as many
partitions as wanted, no limit, because instead of a table of partitions
it uses a linked list (a computer programming concept you don’t need now
to understand).
So we have: 4 primary partitions.
One of them can be an extended partition, a container.
Inside of the extended partitions there can be hundreds of logical
partitions.
If you only need 4 partitions, you can use all primaries.
If you need 5 or more, one has to be extended. You can have 2 primaries,
1 extended (also primary), and 3 logical. Or any combination you like.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)
did you mean, that you want to mount partitions of a new HDD that is not connected as an USB device ?
Well, that kind of problem probably doesn’t occur that frequently, especially nowadays with lots of USB sticks, USB HDDs, …
I once had a similar problem, when trying to mount an (old fashioned) external SCSI HDD under openSUSE.
Mounting is only one side of it, and it can quite easily be done using the partitioner of yast - instead of hacking files.
Unmounting such disks is much harder, because Linux/openSUSE afterwards regards them as internal drives,
that may not be removed (!)
(although SCSI drives could well be connected externally instead of internally).
I remember very well that I had real problems not to mount such SCSI HDDs that once were mounted,
in order to be able to disconnect them.
I may have missed this. But I do not understand why you do not use YaST > System > Partitioning. It will offer you a nice understandable interface to partitioining, file system creation and mounting. You will see al possibilities, so it is not easy to forget things. It will do all the things you may forget or are not very happy with like creating the mount point when it does not exist, editing /etc/fstab in the correct way, etc.
When you want to learn all the details, doing it all manualy is of course a good option, but is that realy your goal?
And, while what Carlos explains about the extended partiotion is a very good description IMHO (Carlos, you should copy/paste that somewhere for future use!), the same is also in the link to the SDB I gave you. Read it piecemeal. Try to understand all of the several concepts that are there: disk, partition, file system, mount point. There are of course relations between them, but they are all four different things and should be understood each for themselves.
> And, while what Carlos explains about the extended partiotion is a very
> good description IMHO (Carlos, you should copy/paste that somewhere for
> future use!),
rotfl! Done, thanks.
> the same is also in the link to the SDB I gave you.
Oops. Sorry, I can’t find the link. Perhaps on another thread? :-?
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)
That is quite possible because the OP here has started several threads about “partitioning and/or mounting” last days. This reminder of the reference was to the OP. I assume you know that one very well: SDB:Basics of partitions, filesystems, mount points - openSUSE
On 2013-11-11 16:46, hcvv wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2597162 Wrote:
>> On 2013-11-11 10:46, hcvv wrote:
>> Oops. Sorry, I can’t find the link. Perhaps on another thread? :-?
>>
> That is quite possible because the OP here has started several threads
> about “partitioning and/or mounting” last days. This reminder of the
> reference was to the OP. I assume you know that one very well:
> ‘SDB:Basics of partitions, filesystems, mount points - openSUSE’
> (http://tinyurl.com/3rucjns)
Thanks. No, I hadn’t look there in a long time. What I found was this
one instead:
I looked at Yast and what it could do but I was afraid of using it because I was unfamiliar with it and the HDD that I was introducing into the system had critical data that I wanted to preserve. I still almost lost it due to my misunderstanding of mount points.
I had no idea that when I issued this command, "rm /home/myuser that in fact, linux was reaching out with his long arm and touching sdb1(/home being its mount point).
