Re: [gentoo-user] [SOLVED] External hard disk doesn't mount on boot

["Dan Cowsill" <danthehat@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 11:13 AM, Dan Cowsill <danthehat@gmail.com> wrote:
>  > On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 12:22 PM, Dan Cowsill <danthehat@gmail.com> wrote:
>  >  > On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 11:01 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
>  >  >  >
>  >  >
>  >  >
>  >  > > On Thursday 20 March 2008, Dan Cowsill wrote:
>  >  >  >  > Right, so I have an external USB hard drive always hooked up to my
>  >  >  >  > machine.  I've a listing in /etc/fstab to mount it at boot.
>  >  >  >  > Unfortunately, the drive does not boot because localmount can't find
>  >  >  >  > /dev/sda1.  Now, after the boot process I can find /dev/sda1 and
>  >  >  >  > mount the drive just fine, leading me to believe that localmount
>  >  >  >  > tries to mount the drive without populating /dev with USB devices.
>  >  >  >  >
>  >  >  >  > How could I resolve this?
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  >  The canonical way is of course to use udev to run a mount script as soon
>  >  >  >  as the usb drive's device is created. This is hard and requires much
>  >  >  >  googling.
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  >  The hackish, kludgy, totally not recommended method that always works is
>  >  >  >  to put a call to 'mount -a' in /etc/local.d/local.start
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  >  :-)
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  >  --
>  >  >  >  Alan McKinnon
>  >  >  >  alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  >  --
>  >  >  >  gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  >
>  >
>  >  Okay, so I wrote a new rule into rules.d that goes like this:
>  >
>  >  KERNEL=="sda", RUN+="/bin/mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /home/dcowsill/usb"
>  >
>  >  Now, this works (sort of).  If I were to run udevstart, udev would
>  >  happily execute mount on the usb drive and all would be well.  If the
>  >  system is restarted or the device is plugged in, no joy.
>  >
>  >  So why is this only executing when I use udevstart?
>  >
>  Good work Dan. I'll save this thread for future reference.
>
>  As someone who has used lots of external drives in the past you might
>  want to do your mount by label or some sort of drive specific UUID and
>  not by /dev/sda1. What can happen over time is that you'll add a
>  second drive and because USB or 1394 often do device discovery order
>  by which drive spins up first two identical drives will come up in
>  random orders which switches your mounting around strangely.
>
>  I've had good luck just mounting by label without using udev but I've
>  wanted to figure this out. You've given me a nice start. thanks.
>
>  Cheers,
>  Mark
>  --
>
>
> gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
>
>

Yeh, I only opted for matching the kernel name of the device because
the headless server I'm working on very likely will never encounter a
new USB device.  But the rule would be more robust.

Glad I could help.

Cheers

-- 
Dan Cowsill
http://www.danthehat.net
-- 
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