Member Avatar for strugglebunny

I can not seem to access any of my fat32 hdd partitions. My computer is dual boot WindowsXP/Fedora Core 4. Xp sees alll the partions fine, but Fedora Core, nothing. My /mnt directory is empty, and I seem to remember some other Linux distro having an fdisk command which allowed you to see all the devices that you could mount, but that doesn't seem to work in Fedora Core 4. Any help would be appericated. If you need any further info, such as hardware configurations of settings, let me know and I'll post them.

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A compact checklist and a practical fstab recipe for keeping FAT32 partitions available at boot on Fedora Core 4. This expands on the thread resolution and gives ready-to-use examples for persistent mounts, sensible mount options for ownership/encoding, and a few troubleshooting checks.

Sample fstab lines (replace the device or UUID and the UID/GID with values from your system):

/dev/sdXN /mnt/win-data vfat defaults,uid=YOUR_UID,gid=YOUR_GID,umask=0022,iocharset=utf8 0 0

UUID=XXXX-XXXX /mnt/win-data vfat defaults,uid=YOUR_UID,gid=YOUR_GID,umask=0022,iocharset=utf8 0 0

Create and test the mount point with:

mkdir -p /mnt/win-data
chown YOUR_UID:YOUR_GID /mnt/win-data
mount -a

Notes on the options: vfat does not store UNIX permissions, so use uid/gid to give a user/group ownership, and umask/fmask/dmask to control file and directory permissions. iocharset=utf8 helps avoid filename encoding problems if you use UTF-8 locales. Using UUIDs (from blkid or the device listing utilities) makes the entry stable across device renumbering.

Quick troubleshooting checklist:

  • Ensure the vfat driver is available in the kernel (check /proc/filesystems or load it with modprobe).
  • Inspect kernel messages (dmesg) after boot or after inserting the disk for detection errors.
  • Install dosfstools (provides dosfsck/mkfs.vfat) to check or repair FAT filesystems safely before mounting.
  • Test a manual mount before adding to fstab; if mount fails, the error from mount and dmesg usually points to the cause.

Thanks to and for pointing toward Fedora filesystem resources and package checks earlier in the thread; this adds concrete fstab options and troubleshooting steps so the partition will come up reliably at boot.

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Member Avatar for comprookie2000

See if this helps, the fat 32 stuff is at the bottom;

Member Avatar for strugglebunny

Yeah, I actually figured this out a while ago. Big duh on me. Thanks anyways!

Member Avatar for kc0arf

Hello,

So is the problem figured out?

My FC3 does have fdisk available to me... I do not have FC4 installed on anything yet. You might need to install a package to get the needed utility. You can look on rpmfind.net for the fdisk package, and it will tell you what package it is a part of (perhaps diskutil?)

Thanks.

Christian

Member Avatar for strugglebunny

Hello,

So is the problem figured out?

My FC3 does have fdisk available to me... I do not have FC4 installed on anything yet. You might need to install a package to get the needed utility. You can look on rpmfind.net for the fdisk package, and it will tell you what package it is a part of (perhaps diskutil?)

Thanks.

Christian

Yeah, I got everything all figured out. I was looknig in /mnt for my devices, instead of /dev. Also I don't think I was runnig fdisk -l as root. Once I figured those things out, I was able to mount with no problems. Now I just have to edit my fstab so I don't have to mount everything after rebooting.

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