quick fstab question

viniosity · 2007-06-21 20:50:28

Folks, sorry for not searching more thoroughly but my verizon DSL keeps going up and down so I wrote this question offline, pasted it in, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that when I hit post that my DSL is behaving. Here goes:

I've got arch on a laptop with an external USB drive. I'd like to have that drive automatically mounted with permissions such that MPD can read/write to it. Currently I can only mount as root and so mpd is pretty useless.

Here's the line I tried in fstab:

/dev/sdb  /mnt/usb      vfat    user,auto,unhide        0       0

I thought it would at least let me mount as a user but it didn't. Can I get a hand as to how to modify that so that it mounts automagically at reboot with permissions for MPD?

Thanks!
(fingers crossed... and.. go!)

mitsoko · 2007-06-21 20:56:21

add defaults option maybe ? ...

Newnux · 2007-06-21 21:41:03

Perhaps this thread will help. I just switched my external to "auto" and turned it on, but it didn't automatically mount. Perhaps it does on reboot, but I don't have this drive active all the time so that's rather useless. In any case, I can mount just fine without root after the help I received in that thread.

Good luck.

lucke · 2007-06-21 21:41:54

Change "user" to "users". I also suggest adding something like "gid=users,umask=0002", so your user would have write access.

viniosity · 2007-06-21 21:48:46

Ok, my verizon is back..

here's my current fstab:

/dev/sdb  /mnt/usb      vfat    users,auto,gid=users,umask=0002,unhide          0       0

Still no luck.. not auto-mounting and can't mount it manually as a user..

Any other ideas?

Newnux · 2007-06-21 21:55:24

Ramses de Norre wrote:

The problem drive is ext3? Chmod and chown it then...
# chown -R youruser:yourgroup /mountpoint
$ chmod -R 750 /mountpoint
And choose user and permissions level a wanted.

That fixed my vfat drive when it was having problems, too. Its fstab line was as follows:

/dev/sdb1    /mnt/sto    vfat    rw,user,sync    0    0

I may be totally off, but it did work for me.

Oh, and perhaps a totally newbie question here, but aren't drives generally sdbx, where x is a number? Is it also possible to have them clean of any number?

Last edited by Newnux (2007-06-21 21:56:18)

samoturk · 2007-06-22 00:06:30

Newnux wrote:

Oh, and perhaps a totally newbie question here, but aren't drives generally sdbx, where x is a number? Is it also possible to have them clean of any number?

Yes, they can be clean of any number. My old mp3 player was /dev/sda

Back to the topic:
If you use hal and kde or gnome it would also help if you erase USB drive line from fstab and let hal handle it. Hal automaticaly detects all drives and partitions and filesystems and mounts them accordingly in /media.
Add hal in rc.conf in DAEMONS line.
Hal has to be in group storage:

gpasswd -a hal storage

and you have to be in group storage and hal:

gpasswd -a username storage
gpasswd -a username hal

Hope it helps.

viniosity · 2007-06-22 02:05:43

Wow, I've tried *everything* on this thread so far and still no luck.

I'm kind of surprised this is so complicated. I searched around a bit and saw some things about creating udev rules?

I do have KDE installed but even after performing those hal/storage tricks there's nothing in /media after startx.

YithianHistorian · 2007-06-22 02:17:54

I have a fstab entry pretty much identical to yours. I use a sata drive so my device field is a little different but that's all. However, I use pmount for all my hardware mounting/unmounting. Maybe give that a try?

Arch Linux

#1 2007-06-21 20:50:28

quick fstab question

#2 2007-06-21 20:56:21

Re: quick fstab question

#3 2007-06-21 21:41:03

Re: quick fstab question

#4 2007-06-21 21:41:54

Re: quick fstab question

#5 2007-06-21 21:48:46

Re: quick fstab question

#6 2007-06-21 21:55:24

Re: quick fstab question

#7 2007-06-22 00:06:30

Re: quick fstab question

#8 2007-06-22 02:05:43

Re: quick fstab question

#9 2007-06-22 02:17:54

Re: quick fstab question

Board footer