Finding a FAT 32 partition

[Jellis]

'm still new at this so bear with me. I installed Win Xp (with ntfs), debian, and an empty fat 32 partiton on my hard drive. I was told Linux has problems writing to NTFS drives, so i used a Fat 32 partition to acces files in either OS. How do I find this partition in Debian? I rebooted into Windows and saw the partion was configured and recognized, so i know it's there. Can anyone help?

[Penguin Skinner]

To find your FAT32 partition quickly, just open up a terminal, and type 'fdisk -l'. This will show all the partitions on your hard drive (I'm assuming you have only one hard drive here.)

In the right hand column, you should see 'W95 FAT32'. The left hand column will give you its Linux device name: e.g. /dev/hda2, /dev/hda3 or similar; /dev/sda2 or similar if your drive is SATA or SCSI.

You'll need to use the device name to mount your FAT32 volume in order to read and write to it. From a shell, either as root or using sudo, you can mount the partition with the command:

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mount -t vfat [device] [mountpoint]

where [device] is the device name shown by fdisk (e.g. /dev/hda2) and [mountpoint] is an empty directory you create.

To have your FAT32 partition mount automatically when you boot your Linux system, you can edit your /etc/fstab file. For example, the following line in /etc/fstab will automatically mount /dev/hda2 to the mountpoint /mnt/hda2 for all users:

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/dev/hda2   /mnt/hda2   vfat auto,users,exec,umask=000   0   0

You can control which users can mount and access a particular partition, whether it mounts automatically or not, and various other options. You'll want to read the man pages for 'mount' and 'fstab' for additional info. Note that FAT32 volumes don't support normal Linux file permissions, which can lead to unexpected behavior. However FAT32 is well-suited to sharing files between operating systems; I do exactly that myself.

Best of luck!