Q I have a hard drive (hda) with Windows 98 and SUSE 9.2 installed on it. I also have another hard drive (hdb) on to which I installed MEPIS PRO. The problem is that when I boot into SUSE, although it sees my Windows files, it cannot see the other MEPIS drive. Running dmesg shows that SUSE is seeing all the partitions including hdb1 - but for some reason I am unable to access it. Originally each Linux distro tried to overwrite the MBR and delete any reference to the other Linux distro. Currently the SUSE GRUB loader gives me Windows and the SUSE option, and it would be nice if it could give me the MEPIS option as well. Because of this tendency to overwrite the MBR I installed MEPIS, including its boot loader, on hdb1. I can access it using the floppy install. The annoying part is that when I am in MEPIS it can see the SUSE partitions on hda. Any attempt to write a line in the fstab file is greeted with an error message when I try to load the hdb1 partition. Any help would be appreciated.
A You can start by checking the partition structure on hdb using fdisk l /dev/hdb. If /dev/hdb1 is the filesystem you want, running the following will manually mount it under /mnt/tmp, where /mnt/tmp is a directory that must already exist:
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/tmp
If this fails, check with dmesg to find out if there is an error from the kernel trying to mount the filesystem, or review the error output from mount to establish why it will not work.