[Techtalk] Mounting USB devices

Peter Samuelson peter at p12n.org
Sun Jan 9 06:13:10 EST 2005


[Marleen Garcia]
> No, don't argue. Maybe I didn't explain this the right way...
> 
> - Mandrake's hardware detection discoveres a number of *sdx1* usb 
> devices, and lists them.
> 
> - They can't be mounted, mount complains of non-existing devices.

OK, that clears it up a bit.  Here's the *real* story, as I see it:

  (1) Mandrake sees these USB devices and decides it should produce
      /etc/fstab entries for them.
  (2) It incorrectly assumes that they will all have partition tables,
      rather than checking to see if they do or not, so it puts "sdc1"
      in /etc/fstab rather than "sdc".

As a result,

  (3) One way to work around the mandrake bug is to create a /dev/sdc1
      identical to /dev/sdc, even though in ordinary usage the two
      wouldn't be identical.

I apologise for insisting that you were doing the wrong thing.  There's
a bug here, but it's not your bug, and your workaround seems to be
reasonable.  (The real fix would be to fix Mandrake's detection thing,
which should autodetect whether to use sdc or sdc1.  But I have no idea
whether this would be easy to accomplish.)


> The *actual* problem is, when booting, /etc/fstab is overwritten, and
> all manually added /dev/ files disappear. Some process in Mandrake is
> doing this, and I can't figure out which one.

As others have said, look for 'udev' as a likely culprit for what is
blowing away your /dev at boot time.

Peter


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