Having trouble permanantly mounting two external USB hard drives.

[hotweiss]

I followed somebodies guide on how to mount NTFS hard drives, and it worked. Then I rebooted and the drives did not show up any more. If I go in and manage my hard drives and change the mount point for one drive it will change the mount point of the other drive to the same thing and I think that's the root of my problem. I did change it to NTFS, etc...

Any ideas?

PS-I did search for a solution, but I had no luck

[penguin.ch]

Re: Having trouble permanantly mounting two external USB hard drives.

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...77658#msg77658
<plus> http://www.penguin.ch/dokuwiki/doku....fig#ntfs_media

[hotweiss]

Re: Having trouble permanantly mounting two external USB hard drives.

I've read the above threads, but they were of no help. The only way that I can mount a hard drive is by using:

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sde1 /media/mickey

Then when I reboot the hard drives disappear.

[dibl]

Re: Having trouble permanantly mounting two external USB hard drives.

I recently discovered the "mount by label" feature, and have been playing with it with a NTFS-formatted thumb drive. In K>System Settings>Advanced>Disks & Filesystems, with Administrator permissions, right-click on a drive and then look at the "modify" options, and you can set it to mount by label name, and to be enabled at startup. It occurs to me that it might work the same with USB hard drives -- I see a lot of folks having problems still.

Here's the line from my Gutsy /etc/fstab that automatically mounts my thumb drive upon boot:

LABEL=DIBLSTUFF /media/NTFSTICK ntfs uid=0,gid=0,auto,rw,user 0 0

Note that the "hotplug" feature doesn't work any more with this thumb drive, when it is set up this way. So, on booting without the thumb drive in the USB connector, there will be a "fail" message for that mount point. And inserting it into the USB connector while the system is running does not automatically start the usual USB hotplug window. But, you can manually go in to K>System Settings>Advanced>Disks&Filesystems and enable it after inserting it on the running system.

I'm still doing experiments with it, and may have missed some problem, but it looks like this might be a way to handle a NTFS-formatted USB hard drive, if you have it connected at boot time.

[hotweiss]

Re: Having trouble permanantly mounting two external USB hard drives.

OK, it seems that a lot of people are having this problem and most don't have a working solution. Although someone here fixed this problem by upgrading to Gutsy Gibbon:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...19/comments/66

Just watch out, he mispelled gutsy as gusty. I copied and pasted gusty in to the sources.list and was disappointed by all the errors. So I decided to revert back to feisty and that's when I realized I was pasting gusty.

I will see if this works. I'm downloading 652 megs of files now

More details pertaining to the upgrade here:

http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net/techbl...tribe_3_alpha/

[SheeEttin]

Re: Having trouble permanantly mounting two external USB hard drives.

dibl: I'd rather use the UUID.

And, if you use /dev/disk/by-id/... rather than UUID=... (or the label equivalent), then you get USB hot-swapping. (I think. I'd test it with my iPod, but it's been subjected to salt water...)

[dibl]

Re: Having trouble permanantly mounting two external USB hard drives.

dibl: I'd rather use the UUID.

I'm using the UUID method for normal hard drives and partitions. I know a lot of people don't like it, but since I had no "history" with Linux, until a year ago, it's just another "feature" to me. Works fine, no problems, and I do kind of tend to push things a bit:

# <file system> <mount point>  <type> <options>    <dump> <pass>

# Entry for /dev/sdb1 :
UUID=fccffe15-2bf7-4830-ba76-d81ee2dbf701 / reiserfs nouser,notail,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 1
# Entry for /dev/sdb2 :
UUID=a6c2ba7b-8492-4746-92af-5182dcb4daab /home reiserfs nouser,defaults,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 2
# Entry for /dev/sda1 :
UUID=f222f97f-278f-4db5-8642-513294f30193 /media/sda1 reiserfs nouser,defaults,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 2
# Entry for /dev/sda3 :
UUID=adf641ca-f64e-4311-bc30-86bfcdcb669c /media/sda3 reiserfs nouser,defaults,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 2
# Entry for /dev/sdc1 :
UUID=1ddd0144-0875-4667-9f98-e90a23f58ff3 /media/sdc1 reiserfs nouser,defaults,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 2
# Entry for /dev/sdc2 :
UUID=710efad8-9f97-4bcd-8f57-8f8cc1facc2f /media/sdc2 reiserfs nouser,defaults,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 2
# Entry for /dev/sdc3 :
UUID=f1912a56-2e5c-45ce-b91b-3ebbe69e20f4 /media/sdc3 reiserfs nouser,defaults,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 2
# Entry for /dev/sdd1 :
UUID=cffddf89-57f3-40ab-a97f-40bb1ea45f16 /media/sdd1 reiserfs nouser,defaults,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 2
# Entry for /dev/sdd3 :
UUID=9b7658da-59e1-4b2b-a4b9-fa3ee11b68cf /media/sdd3 reiserfs nouser,defaults,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 2
# Entry for /dev/sde1 :
UUID=d182b7c3-298c-49b3-ac66-b378033b815c /media/sde1 reiserfs nouser,defaults,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 2
# Entry for /dev/sdd2 :
UUID=94d4d572-3581-491b-90dc-e5f619c65908 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,atime,noauto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto user,atime,noauto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 0
LABEL=DIBLSTUFF /media/NTFSTICK ntfs uid=0,gid=0,auto,rw,user 0 0

[Snowhog]

Re: Having trouble permanantly mounting two external USB hard drives.

My .02 here.

As I have two external USB HDs, and I have installed a second Linux OS to one of them, I realized a 'problem' that may be related here.

First, external USB HDs, due to what they are, are not normally identified in /etc/fstab. That's because they are removable media (HDs). That's were /etc/mtab comes in to play. If a USB device is plugged in when the PC is booted, the USB devices are scanned and an entry for each one is placed into the mtab file. mtab is a dynamically built file - gets created each time you boot.

Second, when more than one USB device is connected during boot, the order in which each is scanned and identified seems to be random. The result being that the naming of each device is subject to change on every boot. As an example, I have two connected external USB HDs. At the moment, my 30Gb HD is identified as /dev/sdd and my 60Gb as /dev/sdb but, if I reboot, the dev identification *will* be changed on both.

In order to automount a device (as far as I know) it needs to have an entry in fstab. Because the /dev/ identification is subject to being changed (in this example), putting these two drives in fstab is an impossibility.

As stated, this is my .02 contribution. I'm not a Linux expert. I, like a lot of us, am learning by trial and error and good observation of same. If I'm totally off base here, please let me know.

[dibl]

Re: Having trouble permanantly mounting two external USB hard drives.

My .02 here.

As I have two external USB HDs, and I have installed a second Linux OS to one of them, I realized a 'problem' that may be related here.

First, external USB HDs, due to what they are, are not normally identified in /etc/fstab. That's because they are removable media (HDs). That's were /etc/mtab comes in to play. If a USB device is plugged in when the PC is booted, the USB devices are scanned and an entry for each one is placed into the mtab file. mtab is a dynamically built file - gets created each time you boot.

Second, when more than one USB device is connected during boot, the order in which each is scanned and identified seems to be random. The result being that the naming of each device is subject to change on every boot. As an example, I have two connected external USB HDs. At the moment, my 30Gb HD is identified as /dev/sdd and my 60Gb as /dev/sdb but, if I reboot, the dev identification *will* be changed on both.

In order to automount a device (as far as I know) it needs to have an entry in fstab. Because the /dev/ identification is subject to being changed (in this example), putting these two drives in fstab is an impossibility.

As stated, this is my .02 contribution. I'm not a Linux expert. I, like a lot of us, am learning by trial and error and good observation of same. If I'm totally off base here, please let me know.

Yep, that's my understanding of how USB devices work, too. But, can you LABEL each drive? That seems to be a "name" that sticks around from boot to boot -- I think that's why "mounting by label" might be a solution to the "ever-changing ID" problem on these USB devices.

[Snowhog]

Re: Having trouble permanantly mounting two external USB hard drives.

Yep, that's my understanding of how USB devices work, too. But, can you LABEL each drive? That seems to be a "name" that sticks around from boot to boot -- I think that's why "mounting by label" might be a solution to the "ever-changing ID" problem on these USB devices.

By LABEL or by UUID would of course, allow one to put entries for them into the fstab file. LABEL and/or UUIDs are unique. And, as you pointed out, the so identified devices will have to be connected at boot, else you will get errors about them not being present.

In my case however, I need to properly identify the USB HD that contains my second Linux OS to Grub. Grub doesn't use anything except (hdx,x) nomenclature.

[SheeEttin]

Re: Having trouble permanantly mounting two external USB hard drives.

LABEL and/or UUIDs are unique.

Not quite--labels can be assigned arbitrarily, while a UUIDs are more or less unique per drive. (I think I read somewhere that copying a disk bit-for-bit will also copy UUIDs, but I'm not sure...)

[Snowhog]

Re: Having trouble permanantly mounting two external USB hard drives.

Thanks for the correction SheeEttin. I should have realized that! :-X