mounting windows partition automatically on HP Pavilion laptop

Avraham Hanadari rufus at hanadari.net
Wed Jun 3 07:33:33 UTC 2009


I made three partitions on my HP Pavilion laptop, when I dumped Vista. 
One is for XP (NTFS); one is for data (NTFS) and one is for Ubuntu 9.04. 
All work fine and I have no trouble manually mounting the data partition 
from U904. I just set about writing to fstab to make an automatic bootup 
mounting of the data partition, but I encountered very unfamiliar file 
content.

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x6125db67

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        5099    40957686    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            5100       14593    76260555    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            5100       10198    40957686    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6           10199       11664    11775613+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda7           11665       14466    22507033+  83  Linux
/dev/sda8           14467       14593     1020096   82  Linux swap / Solaris


I have performed this operation in the past on tabletop computers, but I 
have never encountered a configuration quite like this. I thought I had 
three more or less equally sized partitions. fdisk reveals twice that.

I am guessing that sda1 and sda2 are my XP + hibernation mirror, and 
sda5/6 are my data partition. I am also guessing that sda5 is what I 
want to mount at bootup, so I should do the following:


gksu gedit /etc/fstab

/dev/hda5       /media/windows  ntfs    iocharset=utf8,umask=000   0       0


My fstab looks very unfamiliar, however, and I am unsure where to put 
the new line. Why does it say " was on ... during installation? Is that 
now significant?


# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'vol_id --uuid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# / was on /dev/sda7 during installation
UUID=4e925b6f-5b0c-4080-ab60-eb1a5d31d62a /               ext3 
relatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda8 during installation
UUID=f1adf060-da0a-49b2-b96a-74ef4aeb00ec none            swap    sw 
           0       0
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

I would appreciate your advice, especially if you have experience with 
the HP laptop. I already made the windows directory in media. Is the 
mounting line correct for these circumstances? Should I just add it to 
the end of fstab?

Thanks in advance, Avraham




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