[CentOS] Can't mount FAT32 partition

Tue Aug 30 02:56:40 UTC 2005
Dave Gutteridge <dave at tokyocomedy.com>

Thanks for following up.

>possibilities:
>
>- mount is not made by same user doing cd /mnt/windows
>  
>
I edited /etc/fstab as root, and ran the mount -a command as root.
But I have a regular user account "dave" for day to day use.
But whether I am accessing /mnt/windows as root or as dave, it comes up 
empty.

>- mount is not made by same user running gnome/nautilus
>  
>
This is the case. Root is mounting the drive, and dave is running 
gnome/nautilus.
But I'm a little confused. Only root has the permission to edit 
/etc/fstab or run the mount command, so how would dave access these 
functions?
In any case, as mentioned, even root finds the directory empty.

>- mount references /dev/hda1 but hard drive has different device
>assignment
>  
>
I assumed it was /dev/hda1 because this is what fdisk told me:

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        3649    29310561    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

>dmesg| less #check to see if the drive is assigned a different letter
>  
>
This came up with a bunch of stuff. Is this what I'm looking for?:
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: 58633344 sectors (30020 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=58168/16/63, UDMA(66)
hda: cache flushes not supported
 hda: hda1

>df -h shows mounted filesystems and usage
>  
>
[root at localhost ~]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb1              28G   20G  6.6G  76% /
none                  125M     0  125M   0% /dev/shm

>are you user 512?
>  
>
I don't know. But I want any user of this computer - in other words, me, 
regardless of what permissions setting or log in account I happen to be 
using - to access the drive.

>are you running mount as yourself and not root?
>  
>
This is what happens if I do:
[dave at localhost ~]$ mount -a
mount: only root can do that
As mentioned before, I was doing all the configurations as root, because 
I assumed I had to be root in order to be mucking about with the drives 
and whatnot.

>has the drive been fixed with scandisk/checkdisk since the assault by
>linux fsck?
>  
>
Heh heh... "assault". I like that.
Anyway... I think so. I ran Windows, and it immediately complained about 
the disk and ran scandisk which seemed to have worked as Windows could 
read the files okay, or at least run the programs associated with those 
files. A lot of files got "assaulted", so at this point I can't be 100% 
sure that they've all been corrected. But from a Windows world point of 
view the disk has been scanned and corrected.

>short answer, it shouldn't make a difference being connected via
>internal IDE or external firewire except as external firewire, it would
>be assigned something more like /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda
>  
>
Okay, good to know it's not a connection issue, and more likely a 
settings issue.

Dave