On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 13:07, Jeffrey W Comer wrote:
> I have a Toshiba notebook with two external drives - a Firewirre 30GB and a
> USB 180GB.
>
> I use the USB maybe 1/3 of the time - it's a large box and too big to carry
> around. The Firewire is much smaller and I use it maybe 2/3 of the time.
> It's ready for the road.
>
> When both are connected, at boot time the system sees the USB first and places
> it at /dev/sda; the firewire then becomes /dev/sdb. But when only one is
> connected - the Firewire - it is loaded at /dev/sda.
>
> The filesystem on the firewire therefore sometimes shows up as /dev/sda5 and
> other times as /dev/sdb5, and this makes automount of that filesystem
> difficult.
>
> So - is there a way to force the system to always load the Firewire first,
> before USB, whether or not the USB is connected? Alternately, is there a
> trick one can use in mount or fstab to load this filesystem at the same place
> every time?
>
> OS is Shrike 2.4.20-18.9 (and -13.9).
I've been looking into this too, and at the moment I'm not sure. One
possibility is to label the partitions on the external drives if that's
possible, and then in /etc/fstab instead of having the first item on the
line be /dev/sda1 it can be LABEL=<your_label>.
Another possibility, which is the direction I would prefer to go in, is
to write a recipe for each drive in /etc/updfstab.conf and have kudzu
and updfstab add the appropriate lines to /etc/fstab on boot up. The
trouble with the latter method is that I'm not sure if it works for
hot-pugging the drives, or if you have to fiddle with hotplug stuff as
well. (Do kudzu and updfstab get called only at boot, or do they also do
their stuff when drives are connected and diconnected?) Also, I'm not
really sure where to start with writing the recipes for
/etc/updfstab.conf.
As you're using external drives yourself and I've only just bought my
external FireWire drive, can I ask you a couple of questions? What is
the appropriate way to disconnect these devices? Is unmounting them and
then pulling the lead out sufficient, or are you meant to run some kind
of hotplug script before pulling the cable out? (And similarly for
connecting them to an already running machine.)
Also, has kernel-2.4.20-18.9 caused you any problems with your FireWire
drive? Mine won't work with 2.4.20-18.9 but works just fine with
2.4.20-13.9 (I've posted a bug report: 92193).
Best, Darren
--
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D. D. Brierton darren@xxxxxxxxxxx www.dzr-web.com
Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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