Need help getting a firewire HD to automount during boot in Suse 10

hexstar · 05-06-2006, 10:47 PM

Hello, I have a HP NetServer LH3R running Suse 10 and I've put in a firewire PCI card and connected a firewire external HD to that card, linux sees and can interact with the HD fine but since I'm planning to install cPanel and would like to use the firewire drive as the clients home folder for added disk space I need the drive to be automounted during boot, so far I've tried adding "mount -rw /dev/hdb1 /websites" (without the quotes of course) to /etc/rc.d/boot.local but that didn't work so I removed that and then tried adding "/dev/sdb1 /websites ext3 rw,auto,user,exec 0 0" (without the quotes of course) to /etc/fstab and now Suse sees the drive and knows the mountpoint should be /websites but despite auto being in the fstab file it's not auto mounting during the boot it's still not working :-(...can anyone please tell me what I'm doing wrong and what I need to do to get this drive to auto mount during boot? I'm pulling my hair out trying to get this to work and would greatly appreciate any help you guys can provide me, thanks! :-)

minrich · 05-07-2006, 06:50 AM

What do you have in /etc/mtab (before you manually mount the firewire drive)?

You do realize that fstab only shows the possibilities, whilst mtab shows the mounted file devices. I often have to manually edit (vim) my fstab and mtab when grub booting to a distro that I had inadvertently left one of my USB or firewire drives connected upon shutdown (and then not having it attached when I reboot into the offending 'will not start' distro).

Hope this helps

hexstar · 05-07-2006, 01:54 PM

so I should edit mtab? I tried but when I reboot the changes get reverted :/..how do I do this???

michaelk · 05-07-2006, 05:57 PM

/etc/mtab should never be modified by the user. It is used by the OS to keep track of the mounted filesystems. Typically, USB and Firewire modules are loaded after the OS mounts the filesystems via /etc/fstab so that is why it failed to mount. If you add the Firewire modules to the initrd you will be able to mount the drive via /etc/fstab.

I am not real familar with SuSE so I'm not sure the boot.local is the same thing as rc.local i.e. the last script to run.