List, good afternoon,
I've just finished upgrading a dual-booting Fedora/Windows netbook from F14/XFCE to F23. I haven't been able to solve a minor difficulty, to do with the naming of the Windows partitions.
In F23 I see a (new to me) feature that the Windows partitions automatically appear in both the File Manager, and on the desktop. Previously in F14, I had set mount points for the Windows partitions, and I'd named the mount points WinC and WinD, for example, so that when I needed to access one or the other I could easily see which one to mount. In F23 now, though, the windows partitions are visible already as (for example) '21 GB Volume' and '63 GB Volume'. I can not find how or where these names are assigned, hoping that I could have replaced those names with a named mountpoint.
In F14, I'd set my preferred partition mountpoint names in fstab, but in F23 these partitions are not listed in fstab - despite the partitions already being visible on the desktop and in the File Manager. I'd prefer that F23 didn't present these partitions with those names, and instead let the partitions exist in fstab where they can be mounted onto more meaningful names. (I would still wish to benefit from F23's recognition of 'removable' media which, I think, might be a mechanism that F23 is using to present these Windows partitions.)
Is there a way to prevent F23 using anything but fstab to create any visibility of these (fixed, not removable) partitions? (I could just add these to fstab myself, but I have not done so yet because I wasn't sure whether doing so would mess things up without also removing whatever mounting system F23 is using for them at the moment, eg particularly on mounting or on writing anything to the partition if 2 mount points were existing/active.)
It's a minor problem but I'd be grateful for any suggestions. (It would be handy anyway to understand the present mounting arrangement, as well.)
Ron
(I'm not sending this out to the list, as I am not completely sure that my surmises are correct here.)
I believe that if you label the partitions, they will show up with the labels, just as USB sticks do. I also believe that you can use gparted to label the partitions. I do not believe that labelling the partitions will affect their behaviour under Windows.
Just remember than any attempt to modify partitions can cause damage to your system.
peter
On 01/31/2016 07:40 AM, Ron Leach wrote:
List, good afternoon,
I've just finished upgrading a dual-booting Fedora/Windows netbook from F14/XFCE to F23. I haven't been able to solve a minor difficulty, to do with the naming of the Windows partitions.
In F23 I see a (new to me) feature that the Windows partitions automatically appear in both the File Manager, and on the desktop. Previously in F14, I had set mount points for the Windows partitions, and I'd named the mount points WinC and WinD, for example, so that when I needed to access one or the other I could easily see which one to mount. In F23 now, though, the windows partitions are visible already as (for example) '21 GB Volume' and '63 GB Volume'. I can not find how or where these names are assigned, hoping that I could have replaced those names with a named mountpoint.
In F14, I'd set my preferred partition mountpoint names in fstab, but in F23 these partitions are not listed in fstab - despite the partitions already being visible on the desktop and in the File Manager. I'd prefer that F23 didn't present these partitions with those names, and instead let the partitions exist in fstab where they can be mounted onto more meaningful names. (I would still wish to benefit from F23's recognition of 'removable' media which, I think, might be a mechanism that F23 is using to present these Windows partitions.)
Is there a way to prevent F23 using anything but fstab to create any visibility of these (fixed, not removable) partitions? (I could just add these to fstab myself, but I have not done so yet because I wasn't sure whether doing so would mess things up without also removing whatever mounting system F23 is using for them at the moment, eg particularly on mounting or on writing anything to the partition if 2 mount points were existing/active.)
It's a minor problem but I'd be grateful for any suggestions. (It would be handy anyway to understand the present mounting arrangement, as well.)
Ron _______________________________________________ xfce mailing list xfce@lists.fedoraproject.org http://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/xfce@lists.fedoraproject.org
Oops.
I really should remember that replying to sender when email comes through a mailing list can sometimes send back to the list even when the list is not the sender.
peter
On 31/01/2016 16:22, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
I believe that if you label the partitions, they will show up with the labels, just as USB sticks do. I also believe that you can use gparted to label the partitions. I do not believe that labelling the partitions will affect their behaviour under Windows.
Peter, useful suggestion. Doing this - indeed - changed the 'naming' of the two partitions showing on the desktop, and in File Manager. It's not quite perfect yet, I'll explain below.
For the record and to assist any Windows users who come to Fedora, unless the partitions have been 'named' by windows, Fedora will list them as '20 GB Volume' or some such, as Peter advised. F23/XFCE includes gparted which will scan all partitions and the Windows partitions, in this case, will show as 'unlabelled'. (Actually, on my machine, the Windows 'Recovery' partition did show up with a name.) gparted will let you rename these partitions but Windows does not like system adjustments 'appearing' that it does not do, itself, because it thinks such might be a symptom of a security problem. So I did not use gparted to change the labels, but instead did so after rebooting and loading Windows.
For completeness, here is what I did in Windows (XP in my case). In Windows disk file manager, 'Explorer' or 'My Computer', I selected each partition that I wanted to label and, using 'right-click', I selected 'properties'. On the 'General' tab of the properties dialog there is an entry field adjacent to a graphic of a disk drive. This field contains the name (or 'label') of the partition; it was empty in my case. Entering a name here means that the partition always has this label or name, regardless of which OS is used to read it. I changed my C drive to say 'WinC', and my D drive to say 'WinD'. On rebooting back into Fedora 23, the two Windows partitions appeared on the desktop, and in File manager, as WinC and WinD.
Almost perfect. I tend to use midnight commander a lot and, in F14, I knew where to look for the WinC and WinD drives because I would have mounted them under /mnt, /mnt/WinD as example. After naming the partitions I could not find them in mc, anywhere. They were not under /home/ron, nor under /mnt nor /media. Yet they must have been somewhere because File Manager could use them. Eventually, I noticed that File manager listed the 'path' where it found these partitions -
/var/run/media/ron/..
Of course this will work for me, but I won't easily remember this - I use this machine only intermittently, mainly when I'm offsite.
Is there a way I can ask fedora to mount these at /mnt/WinD, for example? Or, could I make a symlink at /mnt/WinD, to point to /var/run/media/ron/WinD, and ensure that read and write works across it? (I'm not exactly sure how symlinks work.)
Peter, thanks for the suggestion, it is much more suitable for our use now because we can see which icon and name is which Windows drive.
Ron