Well THAT was fricken stupid! All this time, I was trying to delete this folder and could'nt right? Well I could'nt delete it while it was on the fat32 partition, so I just moved it onto my Linux partition and deleted the stupid thing!

Whats that about? My windows partiton has read,write,execute permissions.

Your fstab indicates this directory is on a second drive. The /media mount point is normally used for removable media like CD's, DVD's and USB connected storage. Also the format is the old Microsoft format vfat. It all seems a little strange. Vfat is common on flash cards but not elsewhere. Over time vfat fragments your disk you loose performance. Baring a better solution, I backup what I had in that partition (perhaps to the other hard drive.) Then I would reformat the partition to ext3 and restore the files. But that's me.

I DID think about doing that, but while transfering everything from the vfat drive over to my linux drive and back, files will fragment anyway, so it's really not an improvemnt right?

Linux on disk formats don't suffer from fragmentation the way that vfat does. When you copy files to the Linux partition the vfat fragmentation will be removed. You may have noticed that unlike Windows, Linux has no defragmentation utilities -- they're not needed. There is no way in Linux to defragment your vfat partition. There's obviously a small degree of tedium involved, draging top level folders between windows. The end result will be a better performing file structure that doesn't degrade over time and use. Even Windows doesn't use vfat on hard disks anymore. If it was my system, I'd do it just to get rid of vfat.

OK.,Thank you My Friend! I have already transfered my files over and am getting ready to install QTparted in order to re-format my vfat to ext3. I did notice a better response when opening those files after they were placed on my linux drive! (faster)

Yeah.,I know all about the absence of defrag apps in linux. Though I did read somewhere that there is still a small amount of fragmentation when transfering files over hard drives.

No biggy! All is well! Thanks again!

Two (three )things:

• could it be two spaces between "My" and "Documents"?
• can you "cd" into "/media/windows/My Documents/incoming" and do a "ls -a-" there?
• if so, issue an "rmdir ./celtic" from there...

<edit> Ooops, that was my answer for the thread im my browser-cache <re-edit> not even that, just not clicked on the second page, must be too tired </re-edit>, I had no idea that there was so much activity since I viewed this first </edit>

randel6564,

Glad you got your problems resolved and did see the performance increase. It is true some degree of fragmentation may be unavoidable. It just that Linux makes an effort to minimize the problem. Microsoft ignored the defragmentation problem and the user suffers for it.

Still, I don't quite understand the response of your system. You had a "umask=0000" in your /etc/fstab and the partition is not write protected. Since the linux driver for vfat is quite mature, it shouldn't have been a problem to delete that directory. I don't recall problems like that on my setup, so what could have caused that behaviour?

Dont know. It is really strange! All I had to do to delete it was cut and paste it onto my linux desktop! The only thing that I can figure is when I wiped hda1 the last time that I installed ubuntu, I left hdb1 intact and some kind of glitch happened between the two drives because before wiping hda1, I had hdb1 in my / folder for a mount point and on the second install, I created the mount point inside /media.

So maybe there was some kind of system file that was created on hdb1 that remained there after I reinstalled my OS and created a different mount point.

Ok, I managed to delete my vfat and create ext3, but now how do I mount it? I renamed it 'vault'. I deleted the folder /media/windows and now just want to create a mount point in / instead of /media.

I know that I need to create a directory folder named 'vault', but what do I add to my /etc/fstab to enable me to mount hdb1 (ext3)?

This is the error that I get when trying to open hdb1, even after doing a sudo mount -a.,

error: device /dev/hdb1 is not removable

error: could not execute pmount

here is my /etc/fstab after deleting hdb1 (vfat).,

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda5 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

Thanks guy's!

System-> Administration-> Disks-> Select your 2nd disk-> Partitions tab-> name and enable. If your disk isn't listed you will need to edit /etc/fstab. I'm not expert at fstab but I believe the adding the following line should work:

/dev/hdb1 /vault ext3 defaults 0 2

Your system will boot with /vault mounted.

sorry for a newbie question,but i was just going through this thread(the (till now)24 replies piqued my curiousity .so what does the /etc/fsab error "umask=0000" mean exactly

After some more research, I was able to get it working.
this is my /etc/fstab now.,

# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda5 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /vault ext3 defaults 0 0

Thanks my friend!

I'd suggest this will enable the disk check during boot. It is really fast on ext3.
@ fragos A "2" is reserved for "/ " AFAIK. .

It is no error, it is rather the "chmod" in /etc/fstab's mounting sequence but it works inversely => "umask=0000" in /etc/fstab is equivalent to "chmod 777 /my/file" on the console. Again it is all explained in detail here.

Thank You, JZ. off to change it! Thanks to all of you!