Will,
1) To get into gnome, on the menu, system > utilities > desktop switching
tools
2) To access your windows drive..
mkdir /mnt/hdax
mount -t msdos /dev/hdax /mnt/hdax
then just cd to /mnt/hdax
replacing x with your drive number.
Will wrote:
> all I wanted to do was access my windows partition from linux and I've
> created tons of errors. I was reading up on it and someone it said that
> there is no support for FAT32 in linux, only FAT. this was ok, I'd just
> set up a 2gig FAT partition to be an intermediate partition, right? I
> created the partition and then when I tried to boot into linux BAM
> error. It said VHS panic root partition \dev\hda5 found hda1 ... <hda5
> hda6 hda7> and locked up. ok I thought this might happen because it
> would shift the partitions up. I then figured out from the boot disk I
> created when making mandrake I could type linux boot=/dev/hda6 ro (ok
> maybe some faqs helped out :) ). so this got me back into linux I
> thought I could just mount my hda5 partition, start emulating windoze
> apps, and all would be well. well that wasn't the case. I got into linux
> but I wasn't greeted by that nice gradiant screen with KDE or gnome
> selection, only that ASCII penguin and the bash prompt. I logged in and
> remembered that "startx" was used to get into KDE. welp I went into KDE
> as root and tried to mount my hda5. I used that exploring thing, went
> into the /dev directory and clicked on hda5. now KDE locked up. great. I
> used ctrl+alt+backspace to kill it. now I was back at the prompt. I
> typed mount /dev/hda5 but it didn't find it in etc/bin and some other
> dir even though I was in /. could anything else possible go wrong? yup.
> I thought GNOME might give me more luck in getting into my windows
> partition, but since that gradiant screen went away after I created my
> windows FAT partition I didn't know how to start it. I went into the
> gnome directory and found a readme. I was under the impression VI was
> like edit in DOS. ok I typed VI readme. It displayed ~'s down the
> screen, and locked up my keyboard! I pressed escape q! because I read
> somewhere that q! closes it but that didn't work. I couldn't do anything
> so I pressed ctrl+alt+del. this began to restart my comp, but then it
> couldn't unmount the root partition! well I just booted back to windows
> to write this message and I have a feeling my that linux partition's
> file system has been damaged. alright now I have a few questions.
> 1) how do I get that gradiant login screen when I boot up back so I can
> select gnome?
> 2) how do I access my windows FAT partition (hda5) I created to be the
> intermediate partition between my FAT32 partition and linux? mount
> doesn't work.
> 3) I very much hate booting linux from a floppy, how do I get loadlin to
> work? I created a dir called linux with loadlin, vmlinuz,
> initsomething.gz and a bat with loadlin c:\linux\loadlin
> c:\linux\vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6/ ro in it, rebooted into DOS mode from
> win, and ran the bat. well I got some weird error.
>
> do you guys recommend I reinstall linux? I just have the fresh installed
> mandrake on my linux partition. well reinstalling would let me create a
> bootdisk that has /dev/hda6 as root on it, and fix q 1, but I still need
> to figure out how to access my windows FAT partition and get loadlin to
> work.
> I really hope all this trouble I'm going through to get linux set up
> pays off in linux being worth it. I haven't really been able to play
> around since I'm getting so many dang errors and problems..
> well, as always, thanks in advance for any help and info.
