Damn Small Linux - Not!

thomasaaron · Joined: 09 Sep 2006 Posts: 12

I'm happy to report I've come a long way with DSL.
Saving my files, DSL applications, and booting from my USB pendrive is all under control.

Here is one more question. I've searched the forum for the answer, and couldn't really find anything helpful.

OK, I'm booting from my USB pen drive. I also have an external 80 Gbyte hard drive installed on a USB port.

I need to be able to access the files I have stored to it. As far as I can tell, DSL is not seeing it, at least, it's not on my mounting tool, and I can't seem to locate it in the emel file manager application.

So, is it possible for me to access that external Hard Drive, and how do I go about it?

By the way, thanks for all of the previous help. I'm nearly ready to start using DSL for my day to day stuff.

Best,
Tom

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

You should be able to acces it.
I can access a much smaller 8GB usb drive.

Do you have it plugged in upon booting?
What does /etc/fstab look like?

I had a problem with one such drive. fdisk on the drive reported parition table not in numerical order. Once that was corrected the drive can be mounted.

Don't know much about the mount tool. I usually use CLI for mounting.

If I don't have it plugged in upon boot then as root I do the following:

# mkdir /mnt/sdb1
# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1

Then I am ready to go.

thomasaaron · Joined: 09 Sep 2006 Posts: 12

THANKS!!!

That did it.
I'm in business!

Best Regards,
Tom

thomasaaron · Joined: 09 Sep 2006 Posts: 12

Oops. Another hangup.

OK, I can now access my external hard drive.

I can pull up documents and whatnot that were made in Windows and backed up to the external hard drive.

However, I cannot actually modify anything in the external drive, or create folders in it, etc... It says permission denied.

I fooled around with the permission setting that you can get when right-clicking on the directories, etc... None of that seems to work.

I need to be able to write to the drive. Any ideas?

Also, how do you become "root"? Is it a login option? (I booted up in secure mode. It prompts for passwords for root and dsl, but I don't see where anything is different.

Tom

bostonvaulter · Joined: 03 Sep 2006 Posts: 31

it is most likely that your hard drive is formated with NTFS. The problem is linux doesn't have any native handling of NTFS, and the tools that are used for it are not that good yet. You have to look up ntfs progs. I'm not sure if there is anything in the mydsl repositry because I haven't used ntfs progs on dsl-n.(or dsl)

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

How do you become root?
$ sudo su

If your drive is NOT ntfs then using those mount commands gives write access to root. For others you would need to specify it with -o options during the mount.