Mounting USB Devices in MDK 10
 

Having a couple problems mounting USB devices in my Mandrake 10 install. I have an external hard drive as well as a USB memory key. One of the USB ports appears to be dead which cost me half an hour of screwing around, but here are the issues.

The port I use appears as /dev/sda1 for mounting, but absolutely refuses to umount. It always says the device is busy no matter what I do. I've tried the -f switch to force it but to no avail. Also, I'm seeing an entry in my /etc/fstab file that points to /dev/scsi/target0/host0/lun0/part1 and mounts to the folder where I access my external drive.

The external hard drive was mounted during install and detected as a windows partition (it's NTFS formatted) and mounts itself to a folder called /mnt/win_c2. I can't umount the thing to put in my memory key and even if I pull it (i know, bad news) and then try to flush the cache and mount the key, it claims that no /dev/sda1 OR /dev/scsi/target0/host0/lun0/* exists.

I guess my question is this: where does the USB device actually mount from? Does it show as /dev/sda or as the other path? Both show in my /etc/fstab and I can't tell which is right or if both are. I don't get any mount errors during boot either. Also, is there another way to force umount? I can't seem to do things the normal way.

Try going to the harddrake and configure it. Maybe it set options for an unremovable drive or something, see if you can reconfig it.

Can't reconfig using harddrake. I can certainly see the device but it's showing as a standard drive with no mounting/removable drive options that I can find.

Can you configure it. If you can it should open up the partition manager that manages normal drives.
There is a tab that you need to click on to select your drive.
My digital camera is sda.
My fstab entry for the camera is:
none /mnt/removable supermount dev=/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,kudzu,codepage=850 0 0

Maybe you can try replacing the current entry with this one? Also remember to remove
the entry for it in /etc/mtab. Thats the file where mounted devices are.

Sorry, had another look at your post saying you can't configure it. All my devices that have a file system can be configured. Just click on it and click on "run config tool" which is at the bottom right of the window.

Oh yeah, is there an error message when you try to unmount it?
If it says it's busy, make suer you're not in it's directory. If you aren't try "fuser -km /mnt/win_c2" to kill processes accessing it.

Back to the hardrake config area. You have to go into expert mode to access extra options when you're in the partition manager, there's an option at the bottom for that.
The main differences see between a normal drive and the camera are a "kudzu" word under "various" and the supermount option is checked.

If you want to know any other differences I can tell you.