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I just installed Android on my netbook and it caused it to not see Linux Mint on my machine and I'm assuming it removed it from the GRUB.

Now the first problem is how do I see the contents of my Linux Mint partition and explore them in Android? Can I use a Terminal or Mount manager?

I dont see anything called /dev/sda as expected. How do I mount the Mint and the Windows partition within Android? What commands would be helpful? What are the names of the hdd device file?

If possible please let me know how to edit the GRUB also! I think I can see them in /dev/block/sda5 - What exact command to mount it? I have superuser access.

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I think you're more likely to get an answer on Superuser as this isn't specific to Android. –  Richard Borcsik May 20 '12 at 14:12
@RichardBorcsik How to mount X from Android is Android-specific, even if X is a Linux or Windows partition. user15225, I would use a Live CD or USB stick to recover GRUB. Android doesn't quite follow the traditional Linux device model and wasn't designed for PCs or dual booting, so I would expect this to be difficult at best from Android. –  Matthew Read May 20 '12 at 15:52

4 Answers 4

The Android's linux kernel would not have the SATA/IDE hard drives drivers installed into the kernel, all it can see is flash cards MMC, understands ext3fs and ext4fs, vfat filesystems so the answer to the question is no you cannot see other partitions outside of the domain of Android itself! What you can do though is this, build a new linux kernel with the appropriate drivers installed in place, then the mounts would work :)

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If Android can't handle SATA/IDE, how can it be installed to begin with? It doesn't seem to be installed on a flash drive from what the question states. –  bigbadonk420 Jun 24 '12 at 15:04
Android x86 is modified and treats /sda as "flash partition" –  t0mm13b Jun 24 '12 at 15:23
Or are you talking about Android on Smartphones/ARM chipsets? In that case, MMC drivers are installed and again, depending on the handset (Samsung uses RFS and there's another one I cannot remember, LinuxStore, Sony as well IIRC), Android's vold binary is responsible for mounting the "volumes" of the varying partitions on the handset - if you were to do this from adb shell, cat /proc/mtd you will see a list of partitions native to that and how its mounted. –  t0mm13b Jun 24 '12 at 15:26

There is a mount command builtin:


As I've yet looked into /mnt, I can see only entries owned by root, system or sdcard_rw. I guess you need privileged rights to perform mounting! If you have them you could just try mounting if you know the device name. As you questioned partition tools (in order to get the device name) I can't help you here, but you could just execute mount (with no arguments) and maybe your hard disk already shows up and/or you could conclude the partition you want to mount.

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fdisk <device> will show you all the partitions available on a certain drive. If you've installed Android on the same drive as your Linux Mint, you already know that the drive works with Android, so just try something like fdisk /dev/block/sda in your case (no partition number, just the device sda).

From there you should be able to figure out what partition (sda#) contains Linux Mint and mount it from there with mount. As always, use man or google for explanations and examples for all the commands :)

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Install android without updating grub, then boot into your Linux system and put entries in /etc/grub.d/40_custom as follows

menuentry "android"{ set root =(hdx,y) linux /android-version/kernel quiet root/dev/ram0 androidboot.hardware=android_x86 video=-16 SRC=/anroid-version initrd /android-version/initrd.img }

Here in **hdx,y (as per your android system) install location and android-version as you are using, then make that file exexcutable.

chmod +x 40_custom

Then do grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Reboot, and while rebooting press Shift to see menu entry "Andriod".

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