Fedora Core 6 autmounts my USB external hard drive in /media/disk. If I go to that folder I see an invisible file that was created that is similar to /etc/fstab for the external device. It has “hal” in its name.

I need to change the ownership of the external drive and I use the “chown –R username folder_I_want_to_change”. This does nothing. It remains the same owner. I then tried change group and chmod 0777 all with the recursion tag and they do nothing.

I need to mount this external drive so all can read, write and exec. I have search and found nothing. This seem to be a very strange thing since it does not exist in the /etc/fstab

I think this has to do with “HAL”

Many thanks in advance Lex

As a suggestion try as root adding an entry in /etc/fstab for the device then, for example;

Make sure the mountpoint does exist before mounting any media; mkdir /media/usb1

Adjust to match your actual external USB drive configuration. See the output from the typed command (as root): 'tail /var/log/messages' minus the single quotemarks.

[root@localhost media]# tail /var/log/messages
Apr 4 18:57:59 localhost ntfs-3g[3895]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 5013)
Apr 4 18:57:59 localhost ntfs-3g[3895]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 18144)
Apr 4 18:57:59 localhost ntfs-3g[3895]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 5089)
Apr 4 18:57:59 localhost ntfs-3g[3895]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 5095)
Apr 4 18:57:59 localhost ntfs-3g[3895]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 5126)
Apr 4 18:57:59 localhost ntfs-3g[3895]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 5128)
Apr 4 18:57:59 localhost ntfs-3g[3895]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 5132)
Apr 4 18:57:59 localhost ntfs-3g[3895]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 5170)
Apr 4 18:57:59 localhost ntfs-3g[3895]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 6061)
Apr 4 18:58:00 localhost ntfs-3g[3895]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 6932)

This does not work.

This is what I get when I take
"/dev/sdb1 /media/usb1 auto noauto,users,rw 0 0"
out of the fstab and set it back to the original format.

tail /var/log/messages
Apr 4 19:10:17 localhost kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
Apr 4 19:10:18 localhost ntfs-3g[4180]: Version 1.328
Apr 4 19:10:18 localhost ntfs-3g[4180]: Mounted /dev/sda1 (Read-Write, label "dont_fail", NTFS 3.1)
Apr 4 19:10:18 localhost ntfs-3g[4180]: Options: noatime,rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,silent,allow_other,nonempty,default_permissions,fsname=/dev/sda1,blkdev,blksize=4096
Apr 4 19:10:18 localhost hald: mounted /dev/sda1 on behalf of uid 501
Apr 4 19:10:20 localhost ntfs-3g[4180]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 4359)
Apr 4 19:10:20 localhost ntfs-3g[4180]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 4471)
Apr 4 19:10:20 localhost ntfs-3g[4180]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 15127)
Apr 4 19:10:20 localhost ntfs-3g[4180]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 11281)
Apr 4 19:10:21 localhost ntfs-3g[4180]: Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 3889)

Then edit the /etc/fstab example I gave you...........


Sure is nice to get the missing KEY piece of information, you failed to mention the fact that this external USB drive is formatted as NTFS.

I got this error.

"failed to access '/dev/sdb1': no such file or directory"

You have two examples, use them as guides not the absolute solution or answer to the issue.

If your external USB hard drive is not attached when the system boots then using the auto option (see second example) is not a good idea, use the noauto option (see first example).

For the details for both example please review;

man fstab
man mount