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  From: Adrian Butterworth <adrian@econ-outlook.com.au>
  To  : Robert Acres <acres@senet.com.au>
  Date: Fri, 06 Nov 1998 11:47:30 +1030

Re: Dos/Windows/Linux connectivity

Robert
you "mount" it.
for full instructions "man mount"

for anyone new to the Linux some very basic points:
1. unlike dos, unix type file systems don't refer to
   files by the device eg c:\autoexec.bat
2. instead the files on a device are mounted into the logical
   file system which starts with the directory "\" called
   "the root directory" and branches from there.
   - it can seem a bit wierd, but in effect disks/partitions get
   grafted to sub-directories of other disks, like a plant can
   get grafted to a branch of another plant
3. once a disk/partition is mounted it looks just like a directory.
   the fact it is a physical disk is transparent for most
   purposes.
4. before you can mount a disk/partition you therefore need to
   have a point to hang it off.
5. casually mounted devices usually hang off a directory
   inside the /mnt directory.

example:
   lets assume your windows partition is the 1st partition on
   the master drive of your primary IDE controller and 
   is formatted as VFAT (this is all very typical)
   the partition is referred to by: /dev/hda1
   its type is: vfat
1. we need somewhere to hang the device (c: partition) off - so you need
to
   create a directory for the purpose if you don't already have one
   as user root "mkdir /mnt/dos"
2. now we can mount the device on it, again as user root
   "mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos -t vfat"
3. its now ready for use "ls /mnt/dos" will list the files
   you'll see the same files as a "dir c:\" under dos
4. you can unmount the system with "umount /dev/hda1"
   if you get told the device is in use, its most likely
   because you've "cd"'d into it. cd out and try again.

There are lots of other things you can mount including CDROMs,
files being shared by other unix, windows, and  novel systems on
the network. 

Regards
Adrian

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