I just installed red hat 7.1. I am new to this, how exactly do I view my windows files in linux? I have 2 hard driver, one is partitioned into linux and FAT32 and the other is FAT32, i want to be able to access the files on the FAT32 drives while in linux. I have heard something about auto-mounting, remember, i am very new to linux.

thanks,
matt

You first have to make sure FAT32 support is compiled into the kernel. The default kernel that comes with 7.1 might already have it compiled in as a module. One way or another, once FAT32 support is in the kernel, you have to mount the partitions you want.

For example, let's say your drives are IDE drives and are partitioned like this:
drive 1 (/dev/hda)
/dev/hda1 = fat32
/dev/hda2 = linux ext2
drive 2 (/dev/hdb)
/dev/hda1 = fat32

You first have to have directories to mount the drives to. (This is just how Unix works.) Go into the /mnt directory and create two directories called "blah1" and "blah2". (or whatever you want)

Then type:
mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/blah1
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/blah2

If that is successful, you can then cd into each of the dirs under /mnt and see the respective filesystems. The mount command sometimes requires that you also specify the type of filesystem being mounted, but Linux is usually pretty good about auto-detecting it, so you don't always have to specify it.

Hope this helps. :)

I am pretty sure that it comes compiled with Fat32 support already, so before you try compiling, try mounting the other drive. Look at the post below, it is not too hard. Of course if you want I can send you an old RedHat book that has that kind of info in it and will help you out, or check online, I think Red Hat has some good docs online. Or look for links on Linux.org

These guys write stuff to beeasy for most anyone.<ul><li><a href="http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/answerstips/story/0,23008,2412470,00.html">screensavers article</a></li></ul>

You probably want to do a mount -t vfat /dev/hdx /mnt/disk

Most linux distros support all the various file system types without needing a kernel recompile.

-randy