vfat partition shows up as a folder in filesystem

jspaceman · #1 4th August 2008, 02:18 AM

Had an XP / Fedora 9 dual boot laptop before. I now have a Toshiba Satellite Vista / Fedora 9 dual boot. 120 gig drive, so 30 gigs Vista, 20 gigs for root, 10 gigs for home, 4 gigs swap, and 100 MB boot. It also has a 46 gig vfat drive for shared Win / Fed storage, and this is the issue I am having.

The old laptop had no restore partition, it would mount the XP ntfs drive and the vfat drives and they would show up on my desktop on linux.

The new one has a new partition of 1.43 gigs, and mounts as Toshiba System Volume on my desktop. Obviously some sort of system restore, it didn't show up when I partitioned my HD during the linux install, but it mounts each time I boot up. The Vista ntfs drive shows up, and is fine, but my vfat drive is mounting, but as a folder in the / filesystem, rather than mounting as a separate mountable drive and appearing on the desktop. I can write and read files to the vfat folder, but it will not send to trash, just delete only.

I'm confused, I don't want to mount or use that partition in linux. And I want to be able to mount the vfat as a drive, and not a folder in the root filesystem. I looked in fstab to find the restore volume, and can't seem to find it. New computer and Vista together is like a double whammy.

Thanks anyone

sidebrnz · #2 4th August 2008, 03:30 AM

Try looking in /etc/mtab, which is a list of all mounted partitions. Once you've found it you can add it to fstab.

jspaceman · #3 4th August 2008, 05:27 AM

Thanks, I was able to unmount the system restore partition at boot, but I still don't know why the
vfat partition is mounted as a folder in /.

jspaceman · #4 8th August 2008, 10:56 AM

I got it all figured out, but now its bugging me why it happened.
I installed Vista, then Fedora 9, then I made a vfat partition to share with win / lin.
I have done this alot as a dual-booter. 98, 2000, and XP.
vfat is pretty old school now that fed 9 has fuse / ntfs support.
So that vfat partition showed up as a folder in root (/), and wasn't mountable, because it was a folder. I used the linux installer, made it a separate partition, formatted it during the fed 9 install as vfat, I had 120 gb hd, so it showed as 110, so I did win vista 30 gb, then fed 9 live install, 100 mb for /boot, 20gb to root or (/), 10 gb to /home, 4 gb for swap, and like 46.2 gb for vfat (/storage). Vista had no problems, and it showed up as a fat32 drive.
When booting fed 9, I would see the laptop restore partition, and it would auto-mount at boot, but the vfat drive never mounted, despite editing fstab repeatedly. So I was reading and writing to a 46.2 gb folder that seemed to be separate from the root filesystem. Pretty weird, really.

After using sidebrnz advice, I checked /etc/mtab, and got the right uuid number, then found it in /etc/fstab, and removed the word default, and added noauto. This stopped the laptop restore partition from mounting, which is part one of what I wanted to do. Thanks again for the post.

Part two was I wanted to stop the win vista partition from auto-mounting at boot, so at the same time I edited the fstab file above, I found the vista partition, and changed auto to noauto. Easy.

Part three was I was hoping for some new posts, but like I said above, vfat is pretty old school now that fed 9 has fuse, and I had fed 9 for a while on my old laptop, and since this was a new one, and I had time, I could re-install if I had to, so I got brave for a minute and re-booted to vista. I then formatted the vfat drive, from fat32 to ntfs, which vista said was the default, and it was the ONLY option. I was going to re-format in fat32, but could only choose default, ntfs.

It took a long time, but then I re-booted into fed 9, and the new ntfs drive auto-mounted, and showed up as 46.2 gb. And I was able to read and write to it.

However - During the boot-up, something in the filesystem FAILED to mount, so I tracked it down to a uuid number, it was something like uuid=3154-7356. I had to boot and reboot the cpu two times to get and verify the correct uuid number.
So I logged in and then logged in as su, and edited fstab again, using the uuid number, I located the line in fstab, and then, remembering a genius post I read on this forum, I followed this users advice, and instead of deleting the line in fstab, I just put one of these in front of it.
" # "
A comment line.
The post said never delete a line of code, just mask it out with a comment mark. (It's always easier to just add or delete the # instead of re-inventing the wheel.)

And that did it. I rebooted, the new ntfs drive is the only drive that auto-mounts now, which is great because it is the win / lin shared storage drive, and I am happy. The only weird thing is that now the old vfat drive/folder thing is still in the root (/) filesystem. So I logged on as su, in a terminal, and rmdir / ......, and it is gone. Before I deleted it, I viewed it, it showed empty, as it had no files, and showed 13.5 gb free space. Filesystem or root showed 13.5 gb space as well, so I figured it was just a folder in the root filesystem by then.

The lesson I learned here is that since I am now the administrator of two of these new laptops, as an old vfat XP - Fedora 8 dual-booter, if I have to re-install or if my daughter wants to dual boot vista / fed 9 on her machine, then I will install vista first to a set size, then fedora 9 or 10, partitioning as such. 250 MB /boot, 20 GB or more root or (/), 10 GB or more /home, and 4 GB or more swap file space.

There will be free space left on the hard drive I would normally allocate as a vfat or fat32 shared storage partition to operate between vista and fed 9. Now I will leave this free space available, as vista can allocate it and format it as an ntfs drive, so install, and reboot to vista.

Now, in win vista, I will make the free unused space on the drive a new ntfs partition to share between win and lin. Format it, reboot, and boot into fed 9. NTFS auto-mounts now with fuse, edit fstab to read-write for user, and no need for dual-booters to use the vfat option anymore. NTFS is a more efficient filesystem anyway, and it makes sense to make the shared storage drive after both OS's have been installed. It still requires a root edit of the fstab file, but why even dual boot into a vfat partition anymore in 2008?

Good learning experience overall, I hope that although this post has been resolved, others might comment about dual booting vista and fed 9 or 10, and vfat VS ntfs now that fuse is here.

Thanks for posting and listening.

jspaceman