How do I access my other drives?

[viciousad]

Is there a linux equivalent to the "my computer" that windows has? I need to access my 'D' drive but have no idea how to get to it.

[Unholy Moley]

Re: How do I access my other drives?

The equivalent is /media in Kubuntu. There's an icon for it next to the K button on the bottom left.

[viciousad]

Re: How do I access my other drives?

Thanks. It's still not showing my other drive, but maybe I have to restart for it to show up.

[gnowak]

Re: How do I access my other drives?

If you want an icon for your other drive on your desktop, you can try this:

"Right click" on your desktop (empty space) -> Configure Desktop... -> Behavior -> Device Icons -> Check "Mounted Hard Disk Volume" -> Press "OK"

[SheeEttin]

Re: How do I access my other drives?

It has to be mounted of it to show up. ("Mounting" is actually attaching the drive to the computer, like opening a book. You can't read it if it's closed.)

The best way to do this would be through media:/ (in Konqueror) if you're new to Linux. (If it's an NTFS drive, though, make sure you install the ntfs-3g packages through Adept or other package manager.)

[viciousad]

Re: How do I access my other drives?

I a bit confused still. Looking in media:/ did indeed show my main drive, but not the secondary. This is what I originally did:

When I was running windows, I put all the stuff I wanted to backup into this extra harddrive. It's not an external hard drive, but for heating issues I have the sidepannel of my tower taken off and the extra hard drive is plugged in but it's sitting on top of the tower itself. I'm not entirely sure what all this mounting buisness means, would you please explain a bit? sorry =(

[marshallbanana]

Re: How do I access my other drives?

While your hard drive is physically installed 'mounting' it basically involves putting a folder in linux that points to that location. Here are two guides on how to do that:
if the partition is windows:
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/mountwindows
if the partition is linux:
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/mountlinux

Both of these guides mount it using the command line. You can also do it using gui: http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...68684#msg68684

[SheeEttin]

Re: How do I access my other drives?

Make sure that the drive is both connected for data and connected for power.

If it's a (P)ATA drive, there will be one wide, white or gray ribbon-like cable and one four-wire power connector with a rectangular plug, often white.
If it's an SATA drive, it will have one one small(er), commonly red cable, and one flat power connector, with a right angle at one end (so you can't put it in the wrong way). (Some SATA drives also accept the four-wire Molex connectors, described above.)

Photos for reference: SATA and PATA power connectors (left and right, respectively). Also the PATA and SATA data cables (top and bottom, respectively).

[6StringKng]

Re: How do I access my other drives?

could try installing "ntfs-config" and "ntfs-3g" through adept then running ntfs-config from the terminal...then set where you want it to mount to...

[mchuskie]

Re: How do I access my other drives?

Back to some basics: Drives, partitions and mount points 101!

A "drive" is the physical hardware you wire up to the computer. (NOTE 1: Windows gets this wrong. Windows "drives" are actually partitions.)

A "partition" is, as the name suggests, a self-contained region of the drive that has been formatted and can contain data.

The Linux filesystem tree starts at / (called the "root directory" - not to be confused with the root user!) - sort of analogous to Windows' "Desktop" in that it's the root of the tree. (NOTE 2: Again, Windows gets this wrong since "Desktop" is actually located in x:\Documents and Settings\y\Desktop, thus it's no longer a tree but a graph with cycles... not good!)

In order to access data that's on a partition, you need to connect it to the tree somewhere. The point you connect it is called the "mount point". For all intents and purposes this is just a directory somewhere in the directory tree. By so doing, reading and writing files is made independent of where the files physically are (you can mount things like server shares from the other side of the world and still they look just like normal directories, etc.) (NOTE 3: Yup, you guessed it.)

Linux addresses your drives as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb (or /dev/hda and so on), and their partitions as /dev/sda1 (for the first partition on /dev/sda), etc. (NOTE 4: This does not create cycles as in Windows since here we're looking at the devices/partitions, not the data stored on them.)

[bootdoc]

Re: How do I access my other drives?

can you copy and paste your /etc/fstab here so we can see what is going on. Chances are you have to add a line to this file in order to mount the partition.
something like the following should mount a partition. first column is the device, 2nd is mount point, 3rd is filesystem type 4th is options, 5th and 6th is dump and pass.
this line will mount /dev/hda1 at /media/windows if hda1 is ntfs file system.

/dev/hda1 /media/windows NTFS defaults 0 0

do in konsole
cat /etc/fstab
copy and paste here.