[KLUG Members] mounting removable devices

[Mike Williams]

It must be somewhat consistent between distros because I use Gentoo and 
I found the instructions for doing it on an Ubuntu forum.  The string of 
numbers seems to be taken directly from the hardware, as a model # and 
possibly firmware revision, so I suspect you would get the same data on 
any other machine, but I don't currently have another linux box up to 
try it on.  Since the number might be derived from firmware revision, I 
would be really careful using this method for identifying drives in an 
array.  If you replace a drive, the name might change! 

I doubt it matters if the numbers are consistent between machines as 
long as they are consistent between boots, since I can't imagine a 
scenario where you'd be moving part of /etc/fstab between machines. 

Another interesting thing, which I just noticed, is that there are two 
sets of numbers on my machine that reference the same hard drive.  My 
main drive is SATA, and it's showing up as both 
ata-WDC_WD2500KS-00MJB0_WD-WCANK2094657  and 
scsi-SATA_WDC_WD2500KS-00_WD-WCANK2094657.  I suppose it makes sense, 
since SATA uses the ATA command set, but linux treats it more like a 
SCSI drive and calls it sda not hda.  I didn't think to mention this 
before, but the files in the directories under /dev/disk/ are not the 
actual device files, but soft links to the files in /dev. 

Bruce Damkoehler wrote:
>
> Is it consistent from machine to machine? Have you tried it on 
> different distros?
>
> I will certainly give it a try.
>
> How did you find out about it?
>
>
>
> Mike Williams wrote:
>> I think I finally found a clean way around the problem of removable
>> devices and their mountpoints.  I have a USB thumbdrive and an external
>> ieee1394 hard drive that sometimes don't mount properly.  I had some
>> success using the LABEL flag in fstab (they're both FAT32 filesystem),
>> and it sort of worked, but umount wouldn't unmount it as a regular
>> user.  It would give me an error that /etc/mtab disagreed with
>> /etc/fstab or some such.  A better way is to mount it as the proper
>> entry in /dev/disk/by-id.  Aside from a really ugly-looking fstab file
>> (/dev/disk/by-id/ieee1394-0010100300061861:0:0-part1 is much more
>> cumbersome than /dev/sdc1), it seems to work fine.
>>
>>
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>
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