Difficulty getting a large disk mounted

[Jeff Vian]

On Tue, 2005-02-22 at 09:38 -0500, mconsidine at netreach.net wrote:
> > Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 21:05:03 +0800
> > From: Robert Storey <y2kbug at ms25.hinet.net>
> > Subject: Re: Difficulty getting a large disk mounted

<snip>

> Sorry for creating any confusion.
> 
> The drive has data on it that I want to move over to the FC3
> system already installed.  The data is in a Windows
> filesystem
> structure and I don't want to have to put it into another
> system, boot it, hook it up to the LAN, etc.  I just want to
> get the existing FC3 system to recognize it so that I can
> pull
> the large files off that I need.  Once that is accomplished,
> repartitioning it using and ext2 or ext3 filesystem would be
> perfectly fine.
> 
> Imagine the situation as this : you've got a perfectly well-
> running FC3 installation.  Now you need more diskspace. 
> Someone
> hands you a harddisk that had Win98 and it's filestructure
> on
> it.  The disk was formatted (apparently) using EZ-Drive. 
> You
> are welcome to reformat the disk, but only after copying a
> number of files over to the FC3 installation.
> 
> That's as clear as I can make the situation.
> 
> TIA,
> Matt
> 

With this scenario

The easiest way I can suggest is to 
1. install the drive with the vfat partition
2. # mount /dev/hdd2 /<mount point here> -t vfat
3. cp -a /<mount point>/path/to/files  <destination directory>
   this may give errors about unable to preserve permissions, but you
don't care about that, it will copy the files.
4.  Verify all the data you need is copied
5. umount /dev/hdd2

At this point you can use fdisk to repartition the drive and then mke2fs
to format the ext3 filesystem and then mount it and you are done.