My latest Mandrake 10.1 installation has added some partitions from another Mandrake 10.1 installation on one of my SCSI drives . It added the swap partition and a partition that was mounted as /home in the other installation .

I removed the lines that referenced the other partitions from the SCSI drive and logged out and logged back in. I checked the fstab and mtab files and they were still changed. I then rebooted and then the lines that referenced the partitions on the SCSI drive were back.

Other than removing the SCSI host adapter, how do I prevent the new installation from adding the SCSI partitions?

You probably want to check the logs during bootup. coldplug, hotplug, kudzu and udev may be terms to search for. The /etc/mtab file is dynamic and represents what is mounted. It's changing is not the solution you are looking for. Hotput first goes through the coldplug list to mount things during boot and later may add additional devices. If this is a fixed device and not a usb/scsi device, then the hotplug system may not be the culprit. Kudzu is the daemon that Mandrake uses to detect new devices during bootup. You may want to read the info pages for all of these items and make a note of any of their associated setup files. Also you could mount the initrd file somewhere and check the linux.rc script. A SCSI driver/device may be detected that early.

>>what edits fstab & mtab during boot?


I know about dmesg to see some of the boot information, but not any other logs. Where do I find out about the others?

I did find that disabling the partmon service stopped the editing of fstab ..

It sounds like you found the solution. I don't see how this is much of a problem however.

After I did the Mandrake 10.1 installation, I did not see any device icons on the desktop - mainly the CD/DVD icons.

I looked at the fstab and the references to the CD/DVD drives were there, but there was also a reference to a windows partition and I don't have any form of windows on my pc. The windows partition was actually a OS/2 bootmanager partition and there was no reason for mandrake to even know it was there or try to access it. When I removed that line from the fstab file, and logged off and back on, the device icons appeared on the desktop. When I rebooted, the device icons were gone and the reference to the "windows" partition was in the fstab. There was also a reference to a /mnt/hd partitonin the fstab that I did not create during the install process. That partition was actually a /home partition of a previous Mandrake 10.1 installation made before I changed
my motherboard . The problem with fstab changes only happened after I changed the motherboard.

I have multiple operating systems installed, and I want to be the one who decides when files or partitions are shared.

For devices to appear on the desktop, you need to enable that in the KDE setup. Configure Desktop -> Behaivior -> Device Icons (Tab).

AFAIK, the default setting is for all the device icons to appear. When I checked, they were all selected.

I am not near the computer that has mandrake on it, so I can't check before hand. However, is there a man page or how to on the partmon service. There may be a configuration file that allows you to blacklist certain partitions. Check the FAM documentation also. Often, there are notes, readme files, etc in /usr/share/doc/packages/<packagename>/