windows recognition problems

[Antonio]

squareyes wrote:
> Thanks Antonio,
> I have a feeling that there may be something drastically wrong with this
> install.
> It seems strange that everything is in the same partition, I don't
> remember during install being given the option of anything but /
> Every other distro has a partition mounted as /,  a swap and /home.
> This has resulted in being unable to access 26 gig of my drive.
> The install was over an unsuccessful Deb install which showed
> /hda1 (windows) /hda5 /, /hda6 swap, /hda7 home
> Knoppix shows /hda7 still there, but Ubuntu does not.

You can always move your home on a separate partition by simply editing 
the fstab. In your case adding something like:

/dev/hda7	/home		ext3	defaults	0	1

But before take the care to mount hda7 somewhere (but not in /home) and 
copy all the dirs in /home to hda7, so you don't lost your users' 
configurations.

> Had major probs with Deb install, after logon, startx resulted in no
> screen found,finally copied XF86Config-4 from Knoppix to Deb to get X
> to work.

Please fill a bug-report, I have had always a working X configuration 
with Ubuntu.

> 
> The behavior is strange too, after using the text tool in the Gimp,
> on shutting down via Gnome, shutdown freezes , unable to shutdown
> font...resulting in a hard shutdown
> System has frozen during terminal sessions, and when totem media player
> has been used. more hard shutdowns Ctrl Alt backspace , Ctrl Alt Del 
> have no effect at all

This is very nasty. Please do a deep ram test (at least the first 7 
tests). I had to downclock my Athlon XP from 1400 MHz to 1000 MHz due to 
broken ram, but since then (months ago) I've not experienced a single 
freeze.

It may be also bugs in the video driver, try to use the vesa drive for 
some time.

> I need access to windows, as I use it to print. Have been unable to get
> any Linux distro to run my old Epson LQ500 dot matrix, several linux
> guru's have tried. I wonder if my hardware is the problem, as the only
> distro that has not presented problems has been Knoppix.Everything
> works, only a bit slow, but will access,and  Read/Write to  Windows
> partition.

Only linuxprinting.org can tell you if the printer is supported or not.

>  
> Machine is
> Athlon xp1700
> 256 meg ram
> 32 meg NVidia Geforce video
> 40 gig Maxtor 
> 
> squareyes at ubuntu:~ $ cd /
> squareyes at ubuntu:/ $ ls
> bin   cdrom  etc   initrd      lib         media  opt   root  srv  tmp
> var
> boot  dev    home  initrd.img  lost+found  mnt    proc  sbin  sys  usr
> vmlinuz
> squareyes at ubuntu:/ $   
> 
> Should "home" be in /   ?

Sure! It's always there, even if you use a separate partition for home. 
If you mount something in /home you don't see anymore the content of the 
/home dir in the root partition but you will see the content of the 
partition mounted under /home. You can mount a partition, a cdrom, a 
floppy or a cd image where you want and then you see it as it was a 
normal dir.

> 
> 
> 
>  
>    $ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows
> results in windows partition being mounted, but cannot access any
> further. Shows folders, but cannot proceed from there..

So you can finally mount it! To set the right permissions try to add rw 
and umask=0 options:

     $ sudo mount -t vfat -o rw,umask=000 /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows

these options are the same you can put in the fstab in the options 
column. This is not an hardware problem ;-)

> Have heard of apt-get from so many, sounds like a great system, but am
> starting to wonder if it is worth it. 
> 

While debian is a more difficoult system, I not experienced no blocking 
problems on Ubuntu, also for newbies. Maybe I'm lucky... or not?

> Thanks again for all the assistance,
> sorry to present too many problems at once, but suspect they could all
> be related.

I can hardly see a correlation between such different problems :-)
As I suggetsted, if you want too see clearer rtfm: man mount, man fstab

> Take Care
> Winton 
> 
> 

Cheers,
- Antonio