On Sat, 04 Jan 2003 17:36:31 -0700
Dave Bourassa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Hi all.
> 
> At the risk of displaying my obvious newbiness, and incurring the quick 
> "rtfm" solution, can someone point me in the right direction with the 
> following directions?  I've got lots of manuals and books and magazines, 
> which I've been reading but sometimes it's nice to just be able to ask a 
> direct question and get a direct answer.  Here's the scoop ...
> 
> 1.  How do you do a "dir f:" command in linux ?

First off, Linux doesn't use Drive letters.

Dos & Windows your "directory tree" starts off with a letter, colon...
I.E. your prompt would look like this

c:\>

or a:\>

You get the idea.
In Linux (which is Unix like, it's like Unix...) You don't have drive leters, you have 
a Directory tree!

Your C: drive may be on your Primary Master Hard drive, and it may be the first 
Primary DOS partition.
You could have an Extended partition, with logical partitions.

The Microsoft world has a weird way of doing things once you understand Unix a bit 
better. I now think Windows is confusing. Odd eh?

Anyway.

What you want to do is mount that partition, most often done by the mount command. You 
want to make your partion (as windows would see as C:) to be part of the tree.


so say, you have a directory called mnt, or mount in your root directory (as denoted 
by a /)

shell prompt# cd /
shell prompt# cd /mnt

you could have empty directories there that could be labeled C:, or windows_C:, you 
can have these directories named anything really.
for example, my second Primary partition, on my Primary Master drive is labeled within 
/mnt as hda2, so at the moment /mnt/hda2 is an empty directory. hda2 can be a 
different name, it can be humptydumpty if I wanted it to be.

In my example, I have to mount the second Primary partition, on my Primary Master 
drive. I do this by
shell prompt# mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2
if I had named that directory humptydumpty it would be
shell prompt# mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/humptydumpty

now, if I cd into that directory, it has everything that I had on the second Primary 
partition, on my Primary Master drive.
Once again, Linux doesn't have drive letters, you have to... like allmost fuse it 
together be it partitions, cdroms, tape drives, etc to your file system.

I could mount my second Primary partition, on my Primary Master drive anywhere really.
I could mount it to /home/mypartition or where ever.

the /dev directory is a place where devices are stored. These devices are somewhat 
like in the windows world of things... in a way like your device manager, which 
resides in your system properties. In a way, not entirely.

within /dev you'll have all the references to partitions on certain drives, cdroms, 
scsi, etc.

primary partitions go from 1-4, logical partitions exten from 5 and onwards.
Example.
hdb2 is the second primary partition
hdc5 is the first logical partition.

hda, hdb, hdc, hdd... etc. etc. denotes primary master, primary slave, secondary 
master, secondary slave. 
Following the same order.
hda = prim master
hdb = prim slave
hdc = sec master
hdd = sec slave

your cdrom, if IDE, was on secondary slave, you could mount it like so.

shell prompt# mount /dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom

when you DON'T put a number after hda, hdb, hdc, hdd... etc... it refers to the WHOLE 
drive.
you could, mount a hard drive with NO Partitions, format it, and it'll work perfectly 
fine. 
:) No wasted space to a partition table.

I could go on, but I've got work to do.
Ask questions, ask away. That's what we're here for!

Rich.

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