bjoernvold.com

Well I have never been good at fiddling around with my fstab. It is supposed to work out of the box anyway.
But I have this small problem with my external LaCie HD


On my Mandriva Box it does not mount on boot - and that is bad! But it has this power on/off switch; and when I hit that and turn it back on it is mounted nicely.

So I dance away to my /etc/fstab cause I have read somewhere that it is the place for taking care of stuff like this.
(I have added the usb to my groups)
I notice that all my mounts are done with UUID which is a good thing because it will not matter how I connect my external disks.
In the old days I have experienced that my disks have swapped place and gave me some boot trouble etc.
So UUID is good - I have got that.
Now how to find the UUID of that external USB Disk? I have got that too:

Since I will forget this command I made an alias out of it:

So everytime I write uuid I get the uuid of my disks:


Now that last one is the one in question here so I went to /etc/fstab and added something like this:
#Entry for /dev/sdb1 :


The rest of my /etc/fstab looks like this:



And that thorughly fubars the mounting of my USB HD Now the on/of button gives me an error message and the HD is still not mounted on boot.
The folder LaCie does appear in /media when the disk is mounted so I figured I did not need to create it.
But then again I am figuring wrong here obviously.

The filesystem I get from df -T is fuseblk (it is ntfs)

I tried that instead of auto in fstab but no luck.
As usual when I fubar it probably is something very simple that you Gurus will spot right away - so Help!

Edit:
When auto mounted the disk looks like this:


It mounts some windows stuff called LA-PUBLIC that is vfat. But when I mount with gigolo I am able to mount only LaCie.

I believe if you mount by 'mount' or an fstab entry, which is about the same mechanism, afaik, it will fail if the mount point does not exist. You might try that: making the mount point in the filesystem. Maybe make the mount point unique from what automount creates, to avoid conflicts.



for example.

Also, I think the protocol for the fstab entry is a bit different from what you have. One of my ntfs partitions was configured by the Mandriva automagic installer thusly:



Try with specifying the file system explicitly. See 'man fstab' for the field explanations but I would think using the same values in your entry, except UUID and mount point, of course, ought to be valid.

What he said. ^^

Hmm no big success so far. Trying some more combinations....
I get a lot of only root can mount.

Try:

And mount to it. You can drop the -p of that conceivably.

That does already exist as the default. That is where it mounts when I turn it on without any problem. The problem is to get it to mount during boot.

Ah, yeah, sorry, there was a lot up there to sort through.

Well i found a way to mount it correctly from the CLI:

That should bring me somewhat further. I could put it in /etc/rc.local I guess. But that would fubar the "UUID mount correctly even if attached to another USB port or after a software upgrade" advantage.
To make sure it is always mounted correctly this seems to be the correct way:

......
And putting it in /etc/rc.local did not work - I guess the timing is not correct. So I am going to add a launcher to gnome-shell-properties with this command:

You whish me the best of luck
....
Et voila Ladys and Gentlemen:
It worked

Ok to sum this up:
I started out with the "fstab thing" and meant "mounting my External HD at boot time".
In fact the HD was perfectly mounted every time I connected it; so it was not so much the mounting as it was the timing.
But making automated backups to that disk over the network, looses a lot of functionality if I cannot ensure that it is mounted at boot.

So I ended up with this solution:
Added a launcher in gnome-shell-properties and called it LaCie and entered this command:

This looks more understandable when presented like this:
/usr/bin/udisks --mount /dev/sdb1 and it will do the same but you cannot be sure it is correctly mounted the next time you connect your HD to an USB-port - with UUID you can be!
The UUID number contained above I found by punching

And copying the code from my external USB-disk.
(to find all connected disks, mounted or not; as root:
I did not have to touch /etc/fstab

Life is good again - and maybe someone can learn from my stupid mistakes - or as Einstein put it:
Every idiot can learn from their own mistakes - the genius learns from the mistakes of others..

I am sure our Gurus will enlighten us regarding how to add launchers in KDE

Hmm I have fiddled around with the autostart programs in KDE and it seems to be a bit more complicated than in Gnome:
You need to add a text file named what you want to autostart to
like this I guess:

And save it as LaCie in this case.

You can also do it by the system settings menu in the KDE, menu under system administration...