I asked this on suseforums.net, but that site has mysteriously disappeared in the last day or two.

I have an odd problem. I have two external USB hard drives. One of them has equal parts NTFS and FAT32, the other is entirely NTFS. They mount properly when they are plugged in and turned on. However, every so often the two NTFS partitions become unmounted.

If I turn the drives off, then back on, KDE will mount them again without a problem. If I try right-clicking in Konqueror and choosing "Mount", I get an error, even if I launch it as root.

How do I mount these drives without having to reach for the power switches? My cat likes to chew on the cables, so I have them in a closet on the other side of the wall. The door to that closet is a trip all the way around the house, so I'd like to learn how to avoid doing that every time it happens.

This is my mtab. The drives are the last three entries.

SuSe 10.0 + KDE 3.4

as root:

mount /dev/sdb1 /media/external2
mount /dev/sda5 /media/ntfs
mount /dev/sda1 /media/FAT3

If I turn the drives off, then back on, KDE will mount them again without a problem. If I try right-clicking in Konqueror and choosing "Mount", I get an error, even if I launch it as root.

What error do you get? The system doesn't automatically unount (well I don't think so) driver that turn off while mounted, you may have to unmount (you might need touse the -f option) them before mounting again. In any case, you shouldn't remove/turn off a drive without unmounting it first, as you may create mess on the filesystem (especially on FAT).

Thanks. I'll try those commands if it happens again.

I'm not sure what the error is. KDE pops up a box, makes a sound and the box disappears before I have to chance to read it.

What kind of mess and how do you clean it up?

Here is the situation. I have an mp3 player that I connect via a USB port.
It is mounted as:

mount -t msdos /dev/sdb1 /sdb1
I am using kernel 2.6.16.

If I make the mistake of disconnecting the player without first umounting
it, I cannot thereafter remount it, or anything on sdb, or sdc.

I tracked down the problem to the file /etc/mtab, as the only file that is
different in the /etc directory between two systems, one which works and
one which doesn't. I can't simply copy over the working mtab and reboot,
that doesn't fix the problem.

I have two partitions holding Slackware 10.2. One is the backup of the
other. I fouled up my main partition by the disconnect without umounting.
I wrote a script to compare all the files in the /etc directory:

cd /etc
rm differences
find . -print >allfiles
while read file
do
echo NEWFILE:$file >>differences
diff $file other_partition/$file >>differences
done <allfiles

There is really an intermediate step in the creation of allfiles, but that
is irrelevant.

Only two files come up different: adjtime which tweaks the system clock
and mtab.

If I merely copy over mtab from the working partition it doesn't correct
the problem. If I copy the whole /etc directory over it does fix the
problem.

I can't make any sense out of this.