GOT IT!!! Finally! And it WAS an easy fix....almost. First I tried the solution offered by Neal ManBear step by step but couldn't find PCManFM. Spent a lot of time looking for it. As I write this now I'm wondering if I should have done this under root. Then I tried scoundrel's fix and it worked!!! I jumped off my stool and hugged the dog. So as I look back the reason the guys kept saying I wasn't clear as to what partition I was having a problem with was because I was calling the partition my second partition or the 5 gig partition. I didn't know it was called "/dev/sda3" then, but I do now. I do have one other question.....could my problem been avoided if I had created the 5 gig partition (/dev/sda3) some other way.
Yes it could. But take one step at a time.
I remember where you could choose mount points. I'll have to read up on making partitions under Linux. I was using what I know with Windows. But anyways...Thank you guys soooooo much for your help and patience with me. PCLOS is going to have a new home on my 250 gig drive but I'm going to read up on Linux partitioning first. Thanks again.
Linux partitions have to be mounted before they can be easily read or written to.
The partitions themselves have device names like
/dev/sdb1 (where
sdb would be the whole drive and
sdb1 the first partition on it). There are no C, D or E drives in linux.
But the traditional device names will change if you physically move your disks or programatically your partitions (and they may even change in different ways depending on which partition manager you use).
So instead of using a device name you could use the UUID of the device, a long hexadecimal number like f65a6bdd-b7d3-4b37-9ebf-a3a59e460845 (or a slightly shorter one for a Windows partition). The advantage you get from using UUIDs is that they don't change unless you deliberately change them (for instance by reformatting the partition).
The disadvantage, of course, is that they are impossible to remember.
Instead of using either a traditional device name or a UUID you can label a a partition: give it an easily remembered name. But then the uniqueness of the label is up to you.
And happily you don't have to think about devices or device designations in daily life. The devices you use will be mounted somewhere, and when they are mounted they become parts of the normal filesystem hierarchy. To access them you'll simply access their mountpoints.
A mountpoint is just an ordinary (preferably empty) folder. When you mount
/dev/sdb1 on
/mount/mydata you make everything on
/dev/sdb1 accessible to anyone navigating to
/mount/mydata in a file manaager -- if the permissions of the mountpoint allows them to. In some cases, particularly with non-Linux partitions, you may have to change some user's rights in other ways, but let's not complicate matters.
If the folder you use as a mountpoint isn't empty, everything in it will be covered by whatever is on the partition that you mount there. It won't be deleted from the hard drive, but it won't be accessible anymore.
You can give your mountpoints any names you want (so long as you don't call them
/dev and
/proc or use names of other directories that are needed by the system).
How and where a device is mounted is traditionally specified in the file
/etc/fstab. But if it doesn't have an entry there, the system may mount it anyway, usually on a mountpoint created on the fly under the
/media directory.
But
/media is meant to be used by removable media. If your
/dev/sda3 is a permanent part of your system you should give it a permanent mountpoint somewhere else. But at this stage, don't bother.
