How do I mount sda3?

Forum: DSL Embedded
Topic: How do I mount sda3?
started by: 4ndy

Posted by 4ndy on Nov. 12 2005,02:26

Hiya,

I hope someone can help me. I have a USB stick with three partitions as follows:

sda1: 128Mb vfat partition with DSL Embedded on
sda2: 700Mb ext2 partition running another bootable distro (LiveUSB)
sda3: another ext2 partition that mounts as /home when running the bootable distro.

My question:

How do I get the DSL embedded to mount sda3 as /home on boot, so that I can access my normal data?

I have my full LiveUSB for when I can boot from a USB drive. I can then do all my work in Linux as normal. If however I am in a net cafe or whatever and I can't just reboot the computer, I have DSL Embedded so that I can still work on my stuff within my normal apps.

Is this possible? Also, if it is, can I scrap the 60Mb 'hard disk', as I would be saving all data to the sda3 partition anyway?

I would really appreciate some help on this, as I assume it's not just a matter of altering a couple of text file.

Many thanks,

Andy

Posted by mikshaw on Nov. 12 2005,05:35

I don't think you can do this with embedded (someone please correct me if i'm wrong...it seems there are some limitations with embedded, but i'm not clear on exactly what they are).

Can you boot from USB? If so, you might want to consider a "real" DSL frugal install which will allow you to do what you want. You will likely also have a huge leap in the system's performance.

Posted by 4ndy on Nov. 12 2005,05:54

Thank you for the reply.

I can boot from USB on my system, however the point of the embedded system was incase I took my USB disk somewhere that I couldn't boot from USB.

If this isn't possible with DSL, is anyone aware of any other embedded system this may be possible with?

Many thanks,

Andy

Posted by roberts on Nov. 12 2005,17:59

It is a qemu limitation not a DSL limitation.
Qemu will access virtual hard drives like the hdb that comes with DSL embedded.
I believe there is a work around via Samba.
Search the wiki, I think cbagger wrote about how to do this.

Posted by cbagger01 on Nov. 13 2005,04:26

Yes, there is a work around to access your embedded files from a USB drive. It uses SAMBA and Windows Networking, but it requires that your usb drive be formatted as a single FAT or FAT32 partition so that Windows can see the files.

To made a long story short, you do the following:

1) If your USB drive appears as "E:" drive for example, you open Windows Explorer and right click on this drive and share it on the network.
2) You open a Windows command prompt and type ipconfig and write down your Windows IP address for example 192.168.1.1
3) You start DSL embedded and use either the built-in smbmount or the samba.dsl extension and connect to your share drive to retrieve the files. Use the IP address for your windows computer name. The share name should be the name from step 1. The default is "e".

However, it is more complicated to try and access Linux data partitions from a USB drive while you are using Microsoft Windows as your host operating system.

I won't say that it is impossible, but it will require some creative thinking.

My best guess is to create a persistent home "loop" file on a FAT data partition and then you can use samba.dsl to connect to the share drive and then something like

mkdir /mnt/myhome
mount -t ext2 -o loop /mnt/winshare/loopfile /mnt/myhome

to be able to get at your files.