Windows uses drive letters...

[Murphy]

I am currently trying to move from a Windows environment to Linux and am
stumbling on a few basics.

Ok on a Windows machine the highest lkevel is "My Computer", is this
equivelant to "/" in Linux ?
From there my drives are in "/dev/" where they and many other items appear
to be listed...

How can I simply obtain a catalog of files on a floppy disk ?
I would have thought it was:
ls /dev/fd0

My system has two SCSI disks, the first I have partitioned into Swap and
Linux however I am still trying to access the second... I have created a
pertition using fdisk and have then made a filesystem using mkfs... The
question now is where is my disk and how can I access it ?

Thanks

Murphy

[Lenard]

Post by Murphy
I am currently trying to move from a Windows environment to Linux and am
stumbling on a few basics.

Welcome to Linux!!

Post by Murphy
Ok on a Windows machine the highest lkevel is "My Computer", is this
equivelant to "/" in Linux ?

Not quite, close but not quite the same, 'My Computer' in Windows is more
like the graphic equivalent to /etc/fstab then to the root (/) partition.

Post by Murphy
From there my drives are in "/dev/" where they and many other items
appear to be listed...

Do not assume that this is where your drives and partitions are, consider
this location (/dev) to be basically a place holder for possible drive
devices (hard drives, cdroms, usb devices and etc) and the partition(s)
for these devices. Check your /etc/fstab file for your devices and
partitions mount points, for example your floppy drive might be something
like;

/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0

Post by Murphy
How can I simply obtain a catalog of files on a floppy disk ? I would
ls /dev/fd0

First you need to mount the drive, see 'man mount' for the details. Try as
root something like;

mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

ls -l /mnt/floppy

umount /mnt/floppy

Post by Murphy
My system has two SCSI disks, the first I have partitioned into Swap and
Linux however I am still trying to access the second... I have created a
pertition using fdisk and have then made a filesystem using mkfs... The
question now is where is my disk and how can I access it ?

Look at the output of; fdisk -l /dev/sd?

The same way as the floppy example above, if you do not have a mount point
for the second SCSI hard drive create one as root type something like;

mkdir /mnt/scsi2

mount -t <the_file_system> /dev/sdb1 /mnt/scsi2

See 'man fstab' without the quotes for details on how to mount the second
drive / partition for access when done booting the system.

Some suggested reading, it's from one of the Red Hat manuals and provides
a fairly easy to understand explanation of drives and partitions in Linux;

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/install-guide/ch-partitions.html

Also check out the HOW-TO's from; http://www.tldp.org/

And again welcome to Linux!!

[Morten Juhl Johansen]

Post by Murphy
I am currently trying to move from a Windows environment to Linux and am
stumbling on a few basics.
Ok on a Windows machine the highest lkevel is "My Computer", is this
equivelant to "/" in Linux ?
From there my drives are in "/dev/" where they and many other items appear
to be listed...
How can I simply obtain a catalog of files on a floppy disk ?
ls /dev/fd0
My system has two SCSI disks, the first I have partitioned into Swap and
Linux however I am still trying to access the second... I have created a
pertition using fdisk and have then made a filesystem using mkfs... The
question now is where is my disk and how can I access it ?
Thanks
Murphy

The Linux file structure has a nice introduction at
http://www.micronux.com/catalog/article_info.php?articles_id=6

- Cheers, M

[Bob Goodwin]

The /dev directory gives access to `raw' devices. Reading from /dev/fd0
will get you ones and zeros but not that jpeg picture you wanted. For that
you need a `filesystem'. Windows used several filesystems over time;
fat16, fat32, vfat, and ntfs. Linus primarily uses ext2 and is moving
toward ext3. Formatting a drive creates the filesystem on that drive. To
tell linux which filesystem is on your disk, you use the `mount' command.
Included in the mount command is directions to Linux on where the drives
filesystem should appear within the overall filesystem. See /etc/fstab
(filesystem table), this is a list for automatically mounting drives
at bootup. Also read the `man' pages for mount.


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