[lug] Newbie dual boot question

[Calvin Dodge]

Chuck Smythe wrote:

> Also: I wish to use a partition on my second drive to back up the first
> drive; but the Linux install software did not allow me to specify a
> Windows FAT32 file system for that drive (that system was not one of the
> options offered in Disk Druid).  What software can I use to specify
> that, so that Windows can see that partition?

1) Figure out where you're going to mount the Windows partition - I usually go
with "/mnt/DRIVELETTER", so for C: I'll create a mount pount with "mkdir
/mnt/c"
2) Tell Linux about the partition.  In /etc/fstab include the following line:

/dev/hda1	/mnt/c		vfat defaults 0 0

To mount it you can do any of the following:

1) reboot (though that's kind of silly)
2) start, then shutdown linuxconf (it will see the fstab reference, and offer
to mount the partition)
3) run "mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/c"


If you want selected Linux users to be able to write to the Windows partition,
do the following:

1) add a suitably named group (I usually pick "dosusers")
2) make that the default group for the filesystem (run linuxconf, or include
"gid=N" in the options part of the fstab line, where N=the number of the group)
3) make the filesystem writable by the group ("rw,umask=2" in the options part)
4) add "dosusers" to the supplemental groups for any user who should have that
write access

Here's an example I just set up - "dosusers" group id is 501, so I put the
following line in /etc/fstab:

/dev/hda1	/mnt/c	vfat	rw,gid=501,umask=2 0 0

Holler if you need more info ...

Calvin

-- 
Calvin Dodge
Certified Linux Bigot
http://www.caldodge.fpcc.net