Large HD and VMWare's raw partitions

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

Subba Rao wrote:
> 
> On  0, "Mark J. Dulcey" <mark at buttery.org> wrote:
> > Subba Rao wrote:
> > >
> > > One of my Linux system has a slave disk which is 20GB.
> > >
> > > (0)root at myhost:/~# fdisk /dev/hdc
> >
> > If you really want to have MSDOS filesystems on your hard disk (which
> > can be handy on a dual or multi-boot system), you have to use mkdosfs or
> > DOS/Windows FORMAT to prepare them. This will wipe out any files that
> > may already live in those partitions, so copy anything you care about to
> > another partition first.
> 
> What should the entries be in /etc/fstab? Are there any extra parameters that I
> need to send to the kernel in /etc/lilo.conf?

The fstab entries are probably fine - but you need to reformat the
partitions first. 

Once you actually do have the partitions formatted correctly, you will
have lines like this for each MSDOS partition:

/dev/sda1       /dosc                     vfat           defaults   0  
0

Replace '/dev/sda1' with the appropriate device/partition; yours will
probably something like '/dev/hda5'. (Yes, you can use logical
partitions as well as physical ones.) '/dosc' is the mount point; you
will need one for each partition that you want to mount. (Simply use
mkdir to create the empty directories.) Next is the mount type; 'vfat'
gives you MS-DOS file systems with long file name support, which is what
you want for all modern versions of Windows.

The next one is options for the mount command. You many want something
other than the normal defaults. DOS file systems don't have any
permission information, so the entire file system gets mounted with a
single owner and a single set of permissions, which you can specify when
you mount it. Things you might want:

uid=nnn   set the user ID that all the files on the MSDOS file system
will belong to

gid=nnn   set the group ID

umask=nnn set the umask (effectively, the directory and file
permissions) of all the files. For example, umask=0 would give all
rights to all users on the system.

You can read more about this stuff on the manpage for mount.

Finally, if your kernel doesn't have support for MSDOS filesystems built
in, you might have to load the appropriate kernel modules first. In most
current distributions, they will load automatically as soon as you try
to mount an MSDOS partition, so you won't need to do anything.
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