Ok, im not going to write a whole explanation about fstab, only what you need to add your data partition that we made earlier. On second thought, i say im not going to write a lot about something a lot, but wind up doing it before its all over, so well just see what happens...

Hit your Terminal key that we set up before (linux shortcuts section), and type the following as root user (su):

The mkdir command creates a directory in the location specified, with the name specified. I put it right under the root of the file system /, and the folder will be called A. You can name this folder anything you want, but whenever i say /A, replace the A with whatever you named your folder. The chmod command changes the folders/files permissions. Since we created this folder as root user, no one else will be able to write to it, meaning that YOU can with your user account, so we are changing that. The 777 tells chmod what you want the permissions to be. I explain file and folder permissions in greater detail on the next page. It also has a neat tool to help you understand them.

The gedit line tells Gedit to open the fstab file for you, as root. Now, you should see a file that looks something like the following, note the blank line at the bottom of the file:

Look at the last line of the file, that's the line that will mount your data partition. Mounting is the process of accessing and using the file system. The first part /dev/hda4 tells Linux which device you want mounted. The second part /A is where we are going to mount that file system at, so that we can access its contents. The next part vfat specifies that this will be a FAT32 file system. The next part uid=Alex,rw tells Linux to mount it with Read and Write permissions, and to allow the user named Alex to read and write to it. The last two aren't needed, and i don remember what order is what, but one of the '0' tells Linux that you don want it to be dumped (dumped means backed up in this case), and the other '0' tells Linux that you don't want the file system checked at boot.

With the uid=Alex,rw part, i won get into much detail right now, because i don remember what all the options are for, but there are many options you can use there. However if you are mounting a partition on your hard drive for what we are using it for, then you don need to worry about that right now. Remember to change Alex to whatever your user name is.

Now, as far as the first part -/dev/hda4- you will need to know which device under /dev/ is your data partition that we created earlier. If you remember the layout of your partitions this shouldn't be too hard. hda refers to the hard drive as a whole, and the number part -4- in my case, refers to which partition on the hard drive you e mounting. So if your data partition that we created was the first partition, then you need to change that to /dev/hda1. If it is the second partition, it would be /dev/hda2 and so on.