Labelling(?) a usb drive so that it mounts in a unique location

Ross Clement · 11-22-2009, 07:32 AM

Dear all,

I'm trying to label a samsung 1tb usb drive so that it mounts in a unique location. At present I've had some adventures that can't be undone, but what I have is this: An empty disk formatted in vfat (W95 FAT32). One primary partition. DOS compatibility mode set. All that done with fdisk. This drive was originally FAT32 when I bought it. I formatted it as ext3, but, when I did that Linux wouldn't auto-mount it.

Now in vfat again, it will automount it when I plug it in. But, it auto-mounts as /media/disk. Originally it mounted as /media/SAMSUNG. If it mounted as a unique name (/media/SAMSUNG would be fine, but /media/users or something would also do), then this would be a big advantage. But, how do I do it?

If I, seemingly successfully, format the drive as ext3, then how do I modify automount to make it automount? We use both Gnome and KDE? I'm presuming that using a journaling file system would be safer as it would be easier to recover from any future disk corruption. Wrong?

OS: Fedora 8. I'm trying to install this disk so that I can upgrade to Fedora 12, have user directories on the usb drive, and only the OS, software, and temporary directories on the main hard drive. This should make it easier to upgrade in the future. But I need everything copied to the USB drive first.

linus72 · 11-22-2009, 07:36 AM

You can label it thru command line when you format with

Code:

mkfs.ext3 -L SAMSUNG /dev/sdxx

where sdxx is your drive; sdb1, etc
that will format it ext3 and label it SAMSUNG

or you can also do this with Gparted
just right-click the line displaying the usb and choose
label

not sure how to label it thru command line without formatting it?

Ross Clement · 11-22-2009, 07:49 AM

Thanks. I stumbled into finding out that:

/sbin/mkfs -t vfat -n SAMSUNG /dev/sdb1

gave me a vfat system that automounts on /media/SAMSUNG.

I can format the drive as ext3 no problem. But, no automounting when I plug the drive in. The drive should remain in more or less permanently (and be in during boot). But, how can I make it auto-mount in the correct place? If I give it a label, then I can add something to /etc/fstab, but will this apply when the drive is hot-plugged?

onebuck · 11-22-2009, 08:38 AM

Hi,

You should post in one forum so no confusions arises.

Do a 'man uuid';

Quote:

uuid - DCE compatible Universally Unique Identifier library

SYNOPSIS
#include <uuid/uuid.h>

DESCRIPTION
The UUID library is used to generate unique identifiers for objects that may be accessible beyond the
local system. This library generates UUIDs compatible with those created by the Open Software Foundation
(OSF) Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) utility uuidgen.

The UUIDs generated by this library can be reasonably expected to be unique within a system, and unique
across all systems. They could be used, for instance, to generate unique HTTP cookies across multiple
web servers without communication between the servers, and without fear of a name clash.

A search for 'uuid' here on LQ produced some useful information.

Ross Clement · 11-22-2009, 09:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by onebuck

Hi,

You should post in one forum so no confusions arises.

Do a 'man uuid';

I'm not sure how your reply is relevant to my question. Have you accidentally replied in the wrong thread?

onebuck · 11-23-2009, 08:02 AM

Hi,

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ross Clement

I'm not sure how your reply is relevant to my question. Have you accidentally replied in the wrong thread?

I apologize for the 'dupe' error. But 'uuid' would be a way to uniquely mount your device.