I tried to mount this on my desktop system, made the entries in /etc/fstab,
but the system complains that /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device.
/dev/sda1 was missing completely, so I created it with mknod but I had to
guess at the major/minor numbers.

However on an old laptop running the same version, it works OK.
Is there some way to see the settings for /dev/sda1 on the good machine so I
can do mknod correctly? Or is the problem something else?

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.hardware.]
On Mon, 1 Dec 2003 14:15:41 +0100, Hognoxious staggered into the Black
Sun and said:
A complete listing of all the devices a Linux kernel knows about is
under /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt . Major and minor
numbers are included. How did /dev/sda[1-5] turn up missing, anyway?
Even Redhat 7.0 didn't remove those device nodes automatically.

"ls -l" displays major and minor numbers when it's run on device nodes.
"ls -l /dev/sda1" will tell you that the device has major 8, minor 1.
HTH,

--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
http://www.brainbench.com / "He is a rhythmic movement of the
-----------------------------/ penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL

Hognoxious wrote:

Use, for example, 'ls -la /dev/sda1'. You will see the major and minor
numbers listed, eg.

root@localhost:/dev# ls -la /dev/sda1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 1 Apr 15 2001 /dev/sda1

The major number here is 8, minor number is 1.

HTH

Bartman