external HDD mount command

bobbens · 12-30-2004, 10:11 AM

i would like to make a script to mount and unmount an external 200 GB hard driver. I have no problem mounting it as superuser with "mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt", but i can't unmount it ("umount /mnt") it just says "device is busy" twice.

So i have two questions:
1. How can i unmount the hard driver if when it's not in use it just says it's busy.
2. What mount command makes it so it mounts with read/write privilages for all?

Thanks.

michaelk · 12-30-2004, 10:17 AM

Make sure that no application or console window is accessing the drive when trying to unmount.

For read/write if the drive is formatted FAT32 then add the option umask=000 to the fstab entry.

bobbens · 12-30-2004, 10:22 AM

The things is that i don't want to use the hard drive 24/7 so i just want to be able to mount it with a script giving full read/write access. I don't want to modify the fstab because if it's off at boot time, i'll get an error.
Right now, i don't have any program actively controlling the hard drive, but could gkrellm do something to it?
Thanks.

dr_zayus69 · 12-30-2004, 10:28 AM

if you add the noauto option to the fstab entry then the OS wouldn't try to mount it at start up. Then you could just use the mount command to mount it when you need it.

bobbens · 12-30-2004, 10:30 AM

didn't know that, so once you do that, you just do mount /dev/sda1 /mnt and it will mount there, even though you wrote it on the fstab right?
Thanks i'll try that.

joel112 · 12-30-2004, 11:45 AM

Thats how it works, noauto specifes not ot mount it at boot, but you can still mount it the old fashoned way, you could probably use hotplug to detect the device and mount it when its inserted.

Joel

bobbens · 12-30-2004, 12:13 PM

ok thanks i got it working, i'll look into using hotplug, i know you can modify the detect scripts to make it do what it wants. I still have problems unmounting though, it will rarely unmount, so i just power the hdd off most of the time if i'm sure it's not in use. Thanks.