mounting harddrive problems

lazychris2000

Beginner

Friday, September 12th 2003, 5:15am

when i installed linux, i assigned one of my spare harddrives to be free space....now i want to make that drive into swap......ithe instaler said that te drive is hdg, but when i try to mount, i get 'mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdg1,
or too many mounted file systems
(could this be the IDE device where you in fact use
ide-scsi so that sr0 or sda or so is needed?)'
I have tried every fs type in the redhat bible, but none of them work.....my roommate (who is teaching me how to use linux) is out of ideas, the RH bible didnt help, and i have no idea what to do, but i REALly want another 4 gigs of swap

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Per

Beginner

Posts: 18

Location: Östersund, Sweden

2

Friday, September 12th 2003, 6:27am

You don't mount swap partitions like normal filesystems. First run cfdisk (as root) to find out the name of the partition (some partitioning software creates the partitions from 4 and down to 1). Then mkswap to create the swap space and finally swapon to activate the swap space.

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lazychris2000

Beginner

Posts: 10

3

Friday, September 12th 2003, 6:59pm

i am using Red Hat 9.....what version r u running?

I tried that.....when i typed cfdisk, it said 'bash: cfdisk: command not found'.....then i tried fdisk....thinking that the c was a typo......and it said 'Usage: fdisk [-l] [-b SSZ] [-u] device
E.g.: fdisk /dev/hda (for the first IDE disk)
or: fdisk /dev/sdc (for the third SCSI disk)
or: fdisk /dev/eda (for the first PS/2 ESDI drive)
or: fdisk /dev/rd/c0d0 or: fdisk /dev/ida/c0d0 (for RAID devices)
...' so.....yeah....the [-l], [-b SSZ] and [-u] mean nothing to me and the examles didnt really help.....any more ideas?

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Per

Beginner

Posts: 18

Location: Östersund, Sweden

4

Saturday, September 13th 2003, 12:43am

I'm using Mandrake 9.2 beta which includes cfdisk which is an easier to use and interactive version of fdisk. fdisk can do the same job, but it's not as easy to use. Just use fdisk <device> and replace <device> with your device, /dev/sdg or something similar.

Quoted

cat /proc/partitions

shows the names of your partitions, but if you like me are using devfs they will look like this ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc instead of /dev/hda. You can find the shorter versions in the /dev/ directory if you search for a device file with tha same major and minor number as listed in the first two colums of the /proc/partitions file. The major and minor numbers ars listed where the size is listed for normal files in the directory listing. Note that the /dev/ directory contains a very large number of files.

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lazychris2000

Beginner

Posts: 10

5

Saturday, September 13th 2003, 4:08am

ok, yeah.....Just use fdisk <device> and replace <device> with your device, /dev/sdg or something similar. ....ur gonna hav eto get a little more detailed than that, cause i have no idea what ur talkin bout....gotta remember, ive only been using linux for bout 2 weeks now

and when i did the cat /proc/partitions thing, it said that there was hdg (my other harddrive) and when i tried to mount it, it said 'mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdg, or too many mounted file systems'

so, when i go into fstab and put in all that stuff bout the drive, what do i put for the format? ext3, vfat.....? when i installed linux, i told it to be free space.......and yeah....i put in every single entry from the red hat bible...none of 'em worked...

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Per

Beginner

Posts: 18

Location: Östersund, Sweden

6

Saturday, September 13th 2003, 9:16am

What you want to do is to find out where your swap partition is. Type

Quoted

fdisk -l /dev/hdg

and the swap partition should have Linux swap in the "System" column. If you don't specify /dev/hdg it should list all disks, but that didn't work for me, and this reduces the output. And again, you don't mount your swap spaces. You create your swap space with mkswap /dev/hdgX (replace /dev/hdgX with your swap partition), add the following line to /etc/fstab