I got a 250gb external usb drive for xmas, I connected it to my PC this
morning and the PC rebooted, seems like something got upset and completely
kicked the system over. I have never had any problem connecting and
disconnecting my USB pen and digital camera, the only differences is the USB
pen and camera connect on the front panel USB while the ext. hd connects on
the rear panel USB. Any thoughts???

Secondly I have the following lines in my fstab file (other lines snipped to save space)

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdisk auto users,gid=usbpen,fmask=117,dmask=007 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/camera auto users,gid=camera,fmask=117,dmask=007 0 0
/dev/sda2 /mnt/exthd auto users,gid=exthd,fmask=117,dmask=007 0 0

I mount the external hard drive as follows mount /dev/sda2

but then when I do a

df -h

I get the following result (I've snipped the other lines)

/dev/sda1 233G 1.2M 233G 1% /mnt/usbdisk

Surely it should show up as /dev/sda2 ????

I am using Debian testing with 2.6.8 debian stock out the box kernel

Tim

sda is a devicename, sda2 is apartition. If you want to mount a second partition on an sda device (e.g. a USB device) you'd have to use sda2.

Unfortunately USB devices appear to be counted as they are connected, not according to where they are; i.e. if the first device to be connected is a USB thumbdrive it's going to be named sda whether you plug it into the back or the front of your machine.