USB Thumb Drive Will Not Mount Unless Present During Boot.
 

Actually, the title sort of says it all. I've set my thumb drive up in my fstab, but it will only mount if it was plugged in during boot. Otherwise, I get the following error:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda,
or too many mounted file systems


I'm guessing this has something to do with hotplug, though it was my understanding that hotplug operates all the time, not just at boot.

Anyway, I can't figure out what I'm not doing, and would appreciate assistance.

have you tried mounting /dev/sda1 instead of just /dev/sda ? That was my problem at first as well.

Yup, I just tried it again, and sda1 is still not a valid block device.

After plugging the drive in, use the following command to check how the drive is identified:then mount it as the identified device.


The output on my system after plugging in my camera isso I would mount it with "mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera" (if I had a directory "camera" under /mnt)

r u enabled hotplug start, do u enabled it in kernel

do a dmesg after plugging the usb, if u have enabled hotplug
c what the device is labeled as most probably it will b in /dev/sda1

if so u could mout it as u desire if u want u count mount it in /mnt/cdrom hi

Okay, judging from the output of tailing /var/log/messages, my system is acknowledging the presence of the drive, but not really creating any device for it. This is what I get when I plug the thing in and out hot:

And that's all she wrote. I have no idea what to do about it, though. What is not happening now that evidently happens during boot?

Now the damn thing doesn't work at all. It worked once, but I haven't changed anything. What the hell?

Well, I don't know what the problem is, maybe the fstab entry, maybe modules not loading?

Anyway, here's the page I used to set up my usb stick, have a look through and compare.

Line for line, that's preciesly what I did, except that it showed up as /dev/sda. And it worked twice: the first time immediately after I set everything up, and then once after a reboot cycle. Now, it does not work at all no matter what I try, and I haven't changed anything permanent. I've modprobed usb-storage out the wazoo, and that does not appear to be the problem.

I dunno. Something must be different, but I can't for the life of me pin down what it is. It's not the stick itself; it still performs happily in XP.

Oh, so *now* it's /dev/sdb. I wonder how long that will last.


~Edit~

Okay, that was my problem. Slack decided to pull a fast one on me.

I know this is an old thread, but I've been fighting this issue for about a week, and this is the FIRST post that gave me any idea of what to look for - specifically, I noticed that my system was pointing to the thumb drive as "/dev/sdd1" instead of "/dev/sda1" like my other usb devices (I didn't know that was even a possibility???.) I WAS able to mount the thumb drive when I pointed to /dev/sdd1. Possible stupid question - would it be worthwhile to add an additional line to my /etc/fstab file to account for this situation? I just tried my Olympus camera as well while typing this - THAT device went to /dev/sdb1??? Can somebody possibly explain what's happening here? I haven't read anything anywhere about Linux/Slackware rotating/changing which scsi device path different devices get assigned - if there IS a page somewhere describing this I'd appreciate it if somebody posted a link to it.

Thanks.

Thanks for the thread necromancy. I'd forgotten about it, and I still have this irritating problem with Slack.

GNU/Linux assigns devices by the order they are originally detected.

For example: first USB device it finds maybe /dev/sda, but if you unplug it hot, then plug back into another port, it may decide that it's /dev/sdb.

If you do it enough with enough devices/ports, you can easily get to /dev/sdz. After that, I have no idea....... /dev/sd@ or sd+.....

Any ideas? Hmm.....Sounds like an interesting research project....

So, any ideas on how one sets up /etc/fstab for this? I played with it a few more times last night, and it "appeared" that the devices maintained their assignments, meaning no matter how many times I disconnected the thumb drive it was assigned the same device path, and the same behavior for my camera. As long as this behavior's consistent, it's not a problem, though I'd hate to have to create an entirely new mount point for each and every new device I'd attach.

Note that this is all on the same USB port - I haven't connected 1 device to 1 port, the next to another (I've only got 2 ports on the machine anyway...)

Thanks,

Or perhaps more to the point: is there any way to reserve /dev devices that will remain stable and be assigned only to a specific device that may or may not be present at any given time?