Monting a second disk

Well, I have heard many great things about the Unix-file system and its flexibility. In order to learn more about the file system, and eventually transforming my home network to be Linux-based, I thought I would try to mount a second disk as a folder in my Home-folder.

I was also thinking that I could use this to mount e.g my external USB-harddrive with all my pictures directly in my Home-folder.

I ran in to some problems along the way. I will try to explain them and their solution.

Problem 1 was to mount the disk. In fact the disk was already mounted by the system and showed up in the "places" bar in the file browser. However, I wanted to mount it myself, so I unmounted it (right click, unmount).

Finally, a chance to test the much feared command line... Opening a terminal-window, I used the command:

sudo mount /dev/hdb1 /home/adder1972/xdisk

This mounted the second disk (with one partition; hdb1) to a folder called "xdisk" in my Home-folder. I had cheated and made the target folder in the file browser (I know I can make it command line as well, of course).

Problem 2 was related to user rights. I couldn't write to my drive/folder now called "xdisk". Command line:

ls -l

showed me the user rights, owner, group, etc. I found that the folder was owned by "root", so I needed to change the rights of the folder.

I used command line:

sudo chmod 775 xdisk

BTW, all command line commands are explained thoroughly in the terminal. You can just write:

man chmod

for instance, to check how to use the "chmod" command. However, I find it difficult to use. The "man"-pages are also available on the Interweb.

Anyway, the new user rights did the trick for me, and my extra disk was now mounted as as a folder under "Home".