Devices Not Being Recognized

[actaea]

I just completed my first install of Gentoo & it's mostly working well, but it's annoying to recognize USB devices, and my Frugalware partition, as I have to explicitly mount them. I can't access Windows and Cdroms at all. I keep adding stuff to the kernel hoping that something magically will occur, but I out of even magically ideas.

Here's my fstab file:

/dev/sdc2 \/ ext3 noatime 0 1
/dev/sdc4 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /mnt/frugalware ext3 umask=0222,defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows ntfs umask=0222,defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
shm /dev/shm tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec

Thanks

[Juan Pablo]

So ... do you want automatic mounting?

For that, use ivman or something similar

[actaea]

Juan, thanks for your excellent idea. I'm sure it is getting me closer to answer, but sadly in itself it changed nothing. I still have mount by hand the USB drives and my other linux partition--which is quite annoying. Even worse, my windows partition and cdrom is still not detected at all!

I do have slightly new info about the window partition. When I attempt to mount it (mnt /dev/sdb1 /mnt/windows), the reply I get is "unknown filesystem type 'ntfs'. I'm reasonably sure I've done everything I could possibly do in terms of the kernel to have ntfs recognized, though of course I could be wrong.

Anyway, any ideas would helpful. & I think it's bedtime for me.