fstab problem with external USB hard disk

Szkarbek · 05-29-2009, 12:03 PM

Hello all,
I've got a mysterious problem with my fstab and my external USB hard disk. I'm working under KDE, and everything goes rather well when I switch the device on. The problem is, when I switch it off again, some process deletes my /etc/fstab. Naturally, next time I boot, the necessary files on the internal hd aren't found anymore, which leads to an error. I already found out how to recover from it, but it is time consuming and it makes me silly.
I searched the Internet already for ages for a solution, but I found nothing.
I'm running Slackware 12.2 and I suspect the problem lies on KDE's side. But since I'm working as a normal user (not as root) I'm not sure, which process can change the /etc/fstab at all?
Please help me!
Thanks in advance,

Szkarbek

mostlyharmless · 05-29-2009, 12:54 PM

You might need to supply more details for someone to help you out. Perhaps specifying the errors that you see..

I presume that you unmount your USB drive prior to turning it off?

Szkarbek · 05-30-2009, 03:49 AM

Thank's for the reminder on UNMOUNTING, but that didn't help completely. At least, after trying with unmounting, there appeared no visible error messages anymore. BUT the /var/fstab was deleted nonetheless after switching the external drive off.
Before, when I switched the disk off without unmounting, I got an error message from ext3 which I don't remember exactly, it had something to do with journalling...

More detais:

I attached my /etc/fstab from the instant BEFORE switching the external disk off.

my /var/log/syslog doesn't seem (in my humble opinion) to contain anything interesting, but anyways, I uploaded a snippet from today.

Perhaps, /var/log/debug helps more. Even if I myslf can't find a solution therein... I attached a snipped fom today.

Some details about my system:
Slackware 12.2 on an Athlon 64 with 1 GB of ram. Nvidia graphics card and so on... If more details are needed, you can find them from the attached log files.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mostlyharmless

You might need to supply more details for someone to help you out. Perhaps specifying the errors that you see..

I presume that you unmount your USB drive prior to turning it off?

mostlyharmless · 05-31-2009, 11:32 AM

Odd, one thing I didn't see in your fstab was

Code:

devpts           /dev/pts         devpts      gid=5,mode=620   0   0
proc             /proc            proc        defaults         0   0
tmpfs            /dev/shm         tmpfs       defaults         0   0

(All setup automatically by Slackware 12.1)
Nor do you have a swap partition, not that that's obligatory.

Maybe your fstab isn't being deleted, it's never being saved to begin with. Is it possible that when you boot the system that your overall configuration is not what you think it is? Do you have an unusual boot setup or other unusual setup? What's on hda1-4?