I have a Fedora Core 5 linux system that has some weird behavior regarding an external USB hard drive. Whenever I reboot the computer, I lose my connection to /media/disk for this external hard drive. We use it for nightly backups.

But if I VNC to the box and bring up KDE, I see an icon for the external USB disk. I can click on the icon and open the disk, access files, etc.

I just can't see it at the command line.

Anyone have any ideas? Is there a command I have to give the box to force it to rescan external drives and make them accessible?

Vlad

From my experience I think what happens is, clicking on the icon is a way of telling it to mount and display the contents. In other words, seeing the icon doesn't mean the disk is mounted. From the commandline you would have to use the mount command.

That makes sense. Do you know what the device name that an external USB device shows up as so I can construct the mount command for this?

Vlad

Assuming it's the only usb disk attached it's most likely sda1, but you can always check dmesg to verify. Use "dmesg | grep sd" (without the quotes).

And when you use the mount command, if you want to access the files as a non-root user add -o gid=100,umask=002. The mount command will be something like this:
Again using some assumptions. gid=100 is the uid of the users group so that users can access, and umask=002 sets effective permissions of 775 for the files. NOTE: I think these options only work with vfat and ntfs.

You can automate the mount process by adding a line to the /etc/fstab file, for example:

/dev/sda1 /media/disk vfat defaults,user 0 0

this will automatically mount your filesystem /dev/sda1 on your /media/disk mounting point, assuming the type of the file system is fat32 (vfat). The users (not only root) will be able to mount/umount the filesystem.

Chito

You can automate the mount process by adding a line to the /etc/fstab file, for example:

/dev/sda1 /media/disk vfat defaults,user 0 0

this will, after every reboot, automatically mount your filesystem /dev/sda1 on mounting point /media/disk, assuming the type of the file system is fat32 (vfat). The users (not only root) will be able to mount/umount the filesystem.

Chito