external usb disk shows disk, disk-1, disk-2, disk-3, disk-4

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Hello all,

I am new to linux.
I am running openSUSE 11.1 (i586) and I have a maxtor external usb drive attached.
I used the backup utility in suse to create a backup job that would copy files to my external hard drive.

The problem is that when I disconnect the usb drive or reboot the machine sometimes the drive shows up as a different name. e.g. It first showed up as disk, then disk-1, then disk-2, then disk-3, and now disk-4.

This is a problem because the backup utility doesn’t know that the drive name changed. I had to update the back-up software to say to write to drive-4 because it was set to write to drive-3. So nothing was backed when I checked the external drive.

Any ideas how I can resolve this problem? I’d like to somewhere hard code the drive so regardless if I disconnect it or reboot, it always shows the same name.

TIA

slash

#2

Are you properly unmounting it?

Are you plugging other USB drive into this machine? What order?

#3

Give the disk a volume label

eg: if it’s a ntfs partition

ntfslabel /dev/sdb? storage

?= partition number
and change dev to whatever it is sda - sdb - sdc…

#4

I am not plugging other devices into the machine.

I am not unmounting the drive. I just pull out the cable.
That is probably the problem.

Is there a way to have it stay disk-1 even if it is not properly unmounted?
So if I or someone else pulls the cable out of the machine, it will not change when it’s plugged back in?

TIA

slash

#5

LOL? you do realize that just pulling the cable without safely unmounting will leave the file system flagged as unsafe unmounted and it’ll need to check it next time you mount again. Not to mention that if after copying something and the file system didn’t flush it but kept it in buffer as you pulled the cable just after copying finishes, it can corrupt stuff?

#6

Stop doing that. :open_mouth:

You can damage you data and cause all sorts of problems.

ALWAYS UNMOUNT BEFORE REMOVING!!!

That goes for Windows OS also always press safely remove before unattaching

#7

I guess I do now.
Do you think I should reformat the drive?

I guess I can then put an entry in the fstab with the ntfslabel.

Thx.

slash

#8

That is not only why you have it mounted the next time as disk-1, etc. (because the administartion on your system still has a disk, any new disk (even if you think it is the same) will be mounted on a different place for obvious reasons. But it is also dangerous for your data, especialy as you write to it, because you could not only brake an ongoing write, but there is also something as caching and thus several writes may not even have been done.

And when you follow caf4926’s advive and give it a name, it will be mounted at that name, but you have still to remove it properly.

#9

thx

slash