mounting file system failed

[piet85]

After my old hard disk crashed I got to get a new one and decided for a Serial ATA. Now I'm trying to install Fedora 7 on it. The installation itself is no problem but everytime I boot, there are two errors:
mounting local file system . ..... failed
mounting other file system ...... failed
Then Fedora boots as usual. All drives are available but they are all 4 or 5 GB smaller than they should. In windows they got the size they should.
Another problem is when I move some files on my fat partition in windows they aren't available in the same partition in Fedora.
What did I wrong? I can't believe that fedora can't handle S-ATA.
The drive is partitioned like this:
sda1 win partition (for backups) 20 GB
sda2 /root 10 GB
sda3 /swap 1 GB
sda4 /home 45 GB
sdb1 win 5 GB
sdb2 win 5 GB
sdb3 fat 32 partition for moving files from one OS to the other. 10 GB

sdb is a P-ATA (IDE) hard disk
There's also another S-ATA hard disk only used by windows, I think it has nothing to do with my problem but for completeness I got to mention it.

I installed Fedora three times now, before this time I tried with a smaller /home partition and the fat 32 partition also on sda.

So if anyone can tell what's the problem it would be great.

[Seve]

Hello:
You need to provide a little more information.
From Fedora can you post the output of :

fdisk -l
and
cat /etc/fstab


Seve

[stevea]

It's extremely unlikely that you are missing 5GB off each drive. More likely you aren't correctly interpreting the output of various commands. "fdisk -l" will show you the number of 1KB (1024 byte) blocks. Some utilities esp in Windows but also Lin will show your the number of megabytes as 1000000 = 1MB vs 2^20 = 1MB a 4.8% difference.

As for the mount problem. Post the COMPLETE messages "...." isn't useful. Post the "fdisk -l" as requested and post the contents of the file /etc/fstab. My hunch is that you have a bad/dup label on some partition.

P.S - I think using a FAT32 for file transfer is a poor idea. The permissions and ownership of files cannot be saved correctly. Instead get the ext2ifs driver for Windows and share your etx3 file system. Ext2Ifs allows you to access the Ext2/Ext3 just like any other Windows file system.

[piet85]

Oh, you misunderstood the "...". I wrote it only because at the beginning of the line there stood the first part and what I've written after the "..." stood at the end of the line so it symbolized only the spacing in between, there are no more words. It could also vary a bit from the original English error prompt cause I got to translate.
Here's what fdisk -l said:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 2550 20482843+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 * 2551 3825 10241437+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 3826 3952 1020127+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4 3953 9729 46403752+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 3953 9729 46403721 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 24321 195358401 42 SFS

Disk /dev/sdc: 20.5 GB, 20520493056 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2494 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 638 5124703+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdc2 639 1275 5116702+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdc3 1276 2494 9791617+ b W95 FAT32

sda is the drive I want to run linux, sdb is the one that has nothing to do with linux at the moment and sdc also shouldn't have any linux partition, I just wanted to try whether it changes anything when the fat partition is on an IDE drive.
And here's what's written in fstab:

LABEL=/1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda3 /opt vfat defaults 0 0
LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=SWAP-sdb3 swap swap defaults 0 0

The Ext2 file system support I will install, I didn't know that something like this exists. I've read about ntfs support for linux and sharing files with a fat partition but ext2 for Windows is new to me. What's written on that page sounds good.
So thank you for helping! I hope you can find out what I did wrong,

[Seve]

Hello:
From a quick scan of your /etc/fstab file, you have this line
/dev/sda3 /opt vfat defaults 0 0
From the output of your fdisk -l
/dev/sda3 3826 3952 1020127+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
which is producing one of the error(s) that you are receiving.
Your fat32 partition is [from fdisk -l]
/dev/sdc3 1276 2494 9791617+ b W95 FAT32

You also have this line in your /etc/fstab file
LABEL=SWAP-sdb3 swap swap defaults 0 0
which is producing another error
Your swap partition is [from fdisk -l]:
/dev/sda3 3826 3952 1020127+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

A couple of suggestions.

Make a mount point for your fat32 partition
for example:
mkdir /mnt/fat32

Then, change the entry in your /etc/fstab file from
/dev/sda3 /opt vfat defaults 0 0
to
/dev/sdc3 /mnt/fat32 vfat umask=022 0 0

and change the entry in your /etc/fstab file from
LABEL=SWAP-sdb3 swap swap defaults 0 0
to
LABEL=SWAP-sda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
save, exit and reboot.


Seve

[piet85]

Ok, today I hope I've got time for installing. So I think at first I'll try the ext2 file system for windows, so maybe for the fat partition there's no need anymore, that saves HD space too. I think after this I will reinstall fedora without the fat partition. And then I will see what's wrong with the other ones.
But I'm interested in one question: How can those files be messed up like this? I just installed fedora, while installing I created those partitions and I changed nothing, the messing up has to be happended while installation, but why? You got any idea?

[piet85]

Some problems solve itself. I installed Fedora without the fat partition and there are no errors anymore, I use the ext3 fs for windows and it works pretty good.
So thank you all for helping!