I used to have my external USB hard drive on my machine that has Windows XP. That mostly works fine. I also have a SuSe Linux 9.0 server that I'm trying to get to work.

One of the new things I'm trying to do to my network is to start backing up everything at certain points on each computer. Then I can restore everything with one file (mainly).

I tried dd. dd worked for creating the files, but it complained of space issues when I tried to get it to work with the external hard drive. So I'm trying other programs like partimage.

Since it seems to want a server to send the data to over the network, I switched the drive to the server. That's because then it still only takes 2 computers to back up and not 3. It makes more sense.

So then I ran into difficulties. The drive works fine and everything, but I can't get it to mount with fstab. I can manually add the line, but it never uses it. It only wants to use it's hotplugging results which is an automatic line in the fstab. It mounts fine manually, but I want it to mount automatically.

How to I modify the proper scripts so that they will let me automatically mount the drive? They should automatically mount only external hard drives. The script is in perl language. It's located in /usr/sbin/checkhotmounts.

Here's a link to where I found information on what causes the problem: http://131.111.8.10/pub/doc/suse/sus...00000000000000

I found the answer! I just had to find where it checked to see if it was a harddisk or not, and then set the fstab options it was going to write to the right values (changing noauto to auto). Then I had to use YaST to enable hotplugging at boot instead of most of the runlevels. That was it!

I think a better solution is to just add it to the boot runlevel instead of replacing the other runlevels it runs on with only the boot runlevel. Otherwise, I still think I was right before. Well, if it doesn't boot, it's due to the runlevels I guess.

Maybe the runlevels are simply the wrong thing to change as I've been finding that it can cause errors. But the patch should be the right thing to do.

Or what if I just removed the entry altogether? Then it'd not know about hotplugging the disks though.

OK. So the the better solution I've come up with so far, is you add the line change, but then you delete the old hotplug fstab entry so that it will write a new fstab on bootup. Then you reboot once. That's part of the solution for sure so far.

I'm thinking adding submount to the /usr/sbin/checkhotmounts file fixed the problem best so far.