Linux problm (Red Hat 8)

[nukem]

I am a complete linux newbie. I had installed Linux on my system in the space i formatted using "Disk Druid". My system has windowsXP as well. My problem is that i cannot access any of my other drives which are FAT32 types. The computer boots properly with linux but i am not able to do anything on it due to this problem. PLEASE I really am looking for the luminous path here but i can't get anyone to show it to me.

[x acidreign x]

ya, redhat 8 didn't automatically configure foreign partitions on setup like other versions i can mention, to tell you the truth, i never really liked redhat. anyway, to answer your question, you have to edit the \etc\fstab file to include your drives. its contents should be similar to this:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
/dev/hda6 /osshare vfat umask=000 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0

Pay special attention to the lines starting with "/dev/hda" and then a number, this is refering to your hard drive. if you have more than one hard drive, partitions on the first drive start with hda, partitions on the second start with hdb and then are numbered in the sequence they are detected in. I'm assuming you have one harddrive, windows partion, then linux instaled on other partitions added later, that would make your windows partition hda1, and that it is fat32, therefore, add "/dev/hda1 /mnt/windrive vfat umask=000 0 0" to your fstab file and restart. the contents of your windows partition should be in /mnt/windrive, you can change this in the file to mount the partition wherever you want. some distro requires you create the directory before you can mount anything to it, so you might want to do that first.