I've got an external firewire drive that I want to have automatically mounted on boot. There are 3 partitions on it 2 ntfs & one of them is a FAT32 partition which I want mounted r+w so I can share it with windows.

All this is normally default when I install Mandriva but I've just installed SuSE 10 (which bar this problem is great!) and I just can't mount the thing. Even the KDE GUI tools for mounting won't work. The only way I can mount it is by leaving it unplugged, and then connecting it when the system is fully booted. It recognizes it fine then.

Here's a copy of my fstab. Can anyone make the necessary changes so I can paste it in, also tell me what you've done so I know next time.

Thanks in advance

Steve

PS newbie friendly answers pleaze!


/dev/hda6 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hda7 /home reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/hda1 /windows/C ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /windows/D ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/sda1 /windows/E ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hda5 /windows/F ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hdb5 /windows/G vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,utf8=true 0 0
/dev/sda5 /windows/H ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/sda6 /windows/I vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,utf8=true 0 0
/dev/hdb6 swap swap defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/dvd /media/dvd subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/dvdrecorder /media/dvdrecorder subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs noauto,fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0
none /subdomain subdomainfs noauto 0 0

He, just a quicky to get you going, not much time.

It could be that the driver (module) is not loaded at boot before all of the file systems are mounted.

Module is loaded after the file systems are mounted.

A work around would be to create a startup script in /etc/init.d ( i dont know exactly how suse wants it, but this should work in general) and issue a mount -a command.

Mount -a mounts all filesystems is the /etc/fstab.

If this does not work, check your bootlogging with dmesg command. Find out if the driver (module) gets wacked (nice choice of words ) in some way.
I would do this anyway because the mount -a is not very neat but it should get you going

A new SuSE system is probably running udev, which is supposed to create device files like /dev/sda1 on the fly as needed. Do the /dev/sda1 etc devices exist when you first boot up? Do they appear after unplugging/plugging the drive?

I am not sure what is the right fix (if this is the problem). You could try unloading and reloading the firewire driver module (ieee1394????) with 'rmmod ieee1394 ; modprobe ieee1394' and see if it has the same effect as unplug/plug. If it works you can add it to a startup script - horrible kludge I know

It's really weird. All 3 partitions on the drive show up in SuSE's desktop "My Computer" but none are accessible (they look empty when opened) unplug the drive and then plug it in again and all is well. What the hells that all about then!?!?!

It looks like a bug, probably in the firewire driver, that is not configuring the drive correctly on startup. When you plug it back in, it triggers another configuration attempt which is successful.

What kernel version are you using? There was supposed to be a major upgrade of firewire drivers in 2.6.12.