I've recently installed SuSE 10.1. I've a couple of issues...

1) When I insert my Kingmax 1GB usb drive, SuSE automounts it to /media/usbstick. However, only root is able to write to it. I'm forced to chown the drive to the user that wants to use it instead. Is there a way to make suse automount and allow write to the stick for nonroot users?

2) I don't know if this is a bug or not but I would think it is...when I try to mount it upon boot time in /etc/fstab I noticed dmesg reports that no /dev/sda1 special drive was found...however, a few lines later it detects the drive but it's not automounted (shouldn't the drive be detected before reading /etc/fstab?). So I have to remove the drive and reinsert it so that SuSE automounts it to /media/usbstick.
I'd like it automounted to /mnt/usb instead with write access to nonroot users at boot time. My current workaround was to add this to /etc/rc.d/rc:

mount /dev/sda /mnt/usb
chown username /mnt/usb

I'm sure there's a cleaner and/or more proper way of doing it.

Andrew.

You can useto mount it owned by the GID of the users group and/or use "mode=" to change the mode of the mount.
You probably can't mount it at boot though, because the proper modules need to be loaded before it maps the USB device to a pseudo SCSI device. You could add "noauto,users,rw" to fstab to stop it trying to mount at boot and alow users to mount and write.

I think you meant sda1 instead of sda. I tried a similar command without using mode=666 and that didn't work. Unfortunately your code doesn't work either as it returns a long message...to make it brief:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1

So I tried these instead:

mount -t auto /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb -o gid=100,mode=666

mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb -o gid=100,mode=666

But that just returned the same message. I tried using just sda instead of sda1 as you suggested but same error message.

Any other ideas? Anyone?

This usually means that there is something wrong with the filesystem on the device. Maybe it's corrupt somehow

Can you mount the USB stick at all?
If not you may have to use (c)fdisk to check the partition table.
And maybe mkfs to reformat it.

Mounting it is no problem and all files are readable/writeable.

I found the answer though just prior to finding your reply. I backed up my usb drive and repartitioned it using cfdisk and formatting it as dos (fat32). I then followed the rest of the article just like before and had no problems this time. Thanks for trying to help.

I still can't get it to auto mount the way I want it during boot without doing it manually through /etc/init.d/rc.

You must have had it NTFS.

Definitely not. It was FAT16 but it must've been corrupted.