Maybe this is not the right forums for this question (strictly speaking, it isn't related to game development at all), but I have a nerving problem and need some quick help. I have WinXP, Win98 and Linux installed, on different partitions. So far, the only distros I've tried were Mandrake and Red Hat. Now I want to install SuSE. (Want to try them all, but in order of anticipated difficulty level.) During the installation, it created a swap partition and an Ext/ReiserFS partition from the one Linux native partition I had before (the two new partitions are hda2 and hda4). That seemed to look fine, and since it didn't touch Windows, I continued. Then, after formatting the first of these partitions, I got the following error message: Could not mount partition /dev/hda7 to /mnt/windows/F. You can continue if you know what you are doing but, to prevent damage to your file systems, it is safer to cancel and reboot. I cancelled and now I'm sorta stuck. The windows systems both still work (I had to tweek the boot.ini file, though, due to the new partition). But of course, I want to complete that SuSE installation. Note that I'm still fairly new to the *nix world, but I'm not stupid. As far as I know, the mounting can't damange my windows system, or can it? BTW, hda7 is a data partition... Among other things, it contains the SuSe 8.0 installation data from the SuSE FTP server. Do you think I can safely say Continue after encountering the above message? I mean, is it possible that the SuSE installer (YaST2) will damage one or more of the non-Linux partitions (like hda7)? I would be very happy if you could help a poor Linux newbie. Edit: One thing I should probably add. The hda7 is actually windows drive F... So why isn't it able to mount /dev/hda7 to /mnt/windows/F? [edited by - Origin on September 3, 2002 1:42:48 PM]

The installation kernel might not have support for the appropriate Windows filesystem, especially if its a recent version of NTFS used on the partition (though since you say you''ve used both Mandrake and RedHat, I suspect this isn''t the case). Pressing continue should allow you to go on without mounting the data partition, so you can rebuild/add modules to your kernel later without harming your data''s integrity.

Could it be that the "F" partition is a NTFS one? Maybe the kernel wasn''t build with NTFS support, or you didn''t give it the correct file system type (ie you try to mount it as FAT32).

If the "F" partition is FAT32, then I have no idea. I''d check /etc/fstab and make sure the file systems match, then comment it out and try to mount manually.

Also, make sure that /mnt/windows/F actually exist (I wish the error message was a tad more explicit).

Finally, I don''t see how it could damage the partition, given than it failed to mount it. Again, I have no idea about the state of NTFS handling in Linux, so I''d always mount it read-only.

Anyway, remember to backup your data when you''re about the perform such tasks.

Hope this helps.

The funny thing is, before installing SuSE 8.0 I tried their Live-Eval ISO CD and it worked pefectly for me. It configured everything automatically and I could access every partition with ease (read/write access on NTFS + FAT32). So I guess that can't be the problem, can it?

Thanks so far!
Any more opinions? (Just to be safe... )

BTW: Drive F is FAT32.

[edited by - Origin on September 3, 2002 2:42:38 PM]

Well, I ignored the error message and installed the system. My file systems are still fine but I can''t install any additional packages from within Linux because it keeps telling me that hda7 is already mounted to /tmp/ or something and I can''t access it...

And that''s really weird because it shows me all four NTFS/FAT32 partitions that I have (C,D,E,F) on the desktop. I can even access these drives without problems. Maybe I''ll merge the two new Linux partitions again and repeat the installation. Besides these weird errors, SuSE seems to me like the best distro I''ve tried so far.

The only downside I can actually see is that it has the same bad habit as most other "user-friendly" distros when it comes to defining pre-installed packages. It just installs way too much. I guess that I have to use Slackware (or just deselect all packages by hand) if I want to avoid that...