On 15 Aug, Will wrote: > well I got those 2 emails telling me how to get into my windows drive > but both of your approaches didn't work. I reinstalled linux somewhat > successfully (for the 3rd time!) but get a few warnings about the wrong > kernel ver in system.map and an error with mounting somewhere when > booting. I don't know if loadlin is doing it since that was the first > time I've used it. Could you quote the exact text of the messages? If they scroll off the screen too quickly during boot, you should be able to use `dmesg` to view boot messages from a command prompt. > How do I mount my FAT32X and FAT16B drives onto linux? Is vfat used for > FAT32 and msdos used for FAT16? Nope. Both should accommodate FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32. The difference between vfat and msdos is that "vfat" preserves Windows 95 long file names (and lowercase letters!) while "msdos" uses the old MS-DOS 8.3 format. > I know the commands are: > mkdir /mnt/windows and /mnt/ddrive > mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows and > mount -t msdos(i'm assuming for fat16) /dev/hda5 /mnt/ddrive > I've tried both in the console as root and it says unknown file system > or something like that. Well, that would suggest that either a) you don't have these filesystems compiled into the kernel or b) the module isn't loaded (although it should be by default). Again, it might help if you included the exact error text. Since you've already re-installed twice, and are experiencing other problems, you really might try re-installing again. A stock installation of Mandrake should have full support for DOS/Windows filesystems. > of the FAT16 and FAT32 file systems, which is superior in file > read/write/transfer speed and efficiency? I purposely created another 2 > gig FAT16 partition (faster than a 13 gig FAT32 partition) to hold all > the stuff I want to host with linux. I'm under the impression that the > smaller a partition is the faster and more efficient it becomes, and I > feel this would be very important if I'm hosting and files are > constantly being created/written/removed. please correct me if I'm > wrong. I believe that FAT32 is faster than FAT16 for reading, writing, etc. FAT32 also has the advantage of a smaller cluster size. What does this do for you? Well, let's say you have a small file you save on your drive- only 1 or 2 kilobytes. On a 2GB FAT16 partition, cluster size is 64kB, so this file _occupies_ 64kB, even though it's less than 2kB in size. With a FAT filesystem, every file must occupy an integer number of clusters. Cluster size is determined by partition size. The smaller the partition, the smaller the cluster size. I don't have the conversion table for cluster size, but I know it's available on the Internet. FAT32 has smaller cluster sizes for larger partitons- my 7.2GB drive was once formatted as a single FAT32 partition with 4kB clusters. -Matt Stegman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
