Mounting removeable hotswap hard drive

I have a trayless mobile rack to swap hard drives in and out for backup purposes.

I don’t really care if they hotswap or not (but hotswap does work i.e. the system happily accepts drives being switched in and out while on)

I want any drive that I place in the rack to automagically appear on the desktop the same way as usb sticks do.

How do I do this?

At the moment I have placed one 750Gb drive in the rack and configured through Yast Partitioner and it works fine but if the drive is out or a diff drive is in the rack the system stops booting etc.

Please help as I have searched far and wide for instructions but to no avail.

relevant system hardware is
gigabyte mb ga-ep35-ds3p
opensuse 11.0
icy dock trayless mobile rack

[QUOTE=zartoop;1834731]
At the moment I have placed one 750Gb drive in the rack and configured through Yast Partitioner and it works fine but if the drive is out or a diff drive is in the rack the system stops booting etc.
In my humble opinion after this action the drive is mounted by FSTAB ,so if you restart the system without the drive the system stop booting
Not yet tried with suse 11 ,but with suse 10.3
if a HD drive connected before booting ,it
is mounted automatic , disconnect when system is down and every thing works fine.
Do not know if it always works

regards
dobby9

Yes that is exactly what is happening. But also a drive must always be connected or the system hangs at boot.

I am surprised that there are no solutions so far to this. Surely there must be a way to get a removable hard disk to mount and unmount as easily as a CD/DVD or USB stick.

Either it is impossible or so easy that all reading this think - bloody idiot RTFM!

cheers

zartoop wrote:

>
> Yes that is exactly what is happening. But also a drive must always be
> connected or the system hangs at boot.
>
> I am surprised that there are no solutions so far to this. Surely there
> must be a way to get a removable hard disk to mount and unmount as
> easily as a CD/DVD or USB stick.
>
> Either it is impossible or so easy that all reading this think - bloody
> idiot RTFM!
>
> cheers
>
>

{Chuckle} Well… It’s things like this that sure help to learn a system…

If you will remove the fstab entry for the drive, it will boot happily
whether the removable drive is installed or not, as it doesn’t expect it to
be there. That’s why it fails to boot fully when drive is removed.

When you insert the removable drive, it should autodetect, and automagically
appear in the /media subdir, in the ‘storage media’ location in konqueror,
and most likely will pop up a window asking what to do. I usually just
say ‘open in new window’, ‘do this always’.

I’ve been using linux for quite some time, and suse since around 5.3 or so.
It’s been interesting to watch the system become almost intuitive. Right
click menus have options to do what I want, removable drives show up as you
would expect, it autodetects darn near everything in my system, and runs
solid. In my mind, Microsoft has a long way to go to catch up.

With no malice in mind… I say… “Stop thinking so hard, and just TRY it”.
You might be surprised. :slight_smile:

Take Care,

Loni


L R Nix
lornix@lornix.com

Hey Loni,

Thanks for your sage advice - I have fully stopped thinking:) (I am a long time mac user after all!)

I have done as suggested …

Through Yast Partitioner removed the drive and fstab entry etc.

But … slide a disk drive in - nothing on the desktop, nothing in /media (or anywhere else), no messages or alerts :frowning:

The drive is in Yast and can be de/mounted that way but that’s a bit kludgy

Please help some more

zartoop wrote:

>
> Hey Loni,
>
> Thanks for your sage advice - I have fully stopped thinking:) (I am a
> long time mac user after all!)
>
> I have done as suggested …
>
> Through Yast Partitioner removed the drive and fstab entry etc.
>
> But … slide a drive in - nothing on the desktop, nothing in mnt/ (or
> anywhere else), no messages or alerts :frowning:
>
> The drive is in Yast and can be de/mounted that way but that’s a bit
> kludgy
>
> Please help some more
>
>

Ha ha! Didn’t mean it THAT way… don’t want a drone! {Smile}

in a console, as root, try viewing the system log while inserting and removing
the drive.

tailf /var/log/messages

Hopefully, there should be messages indicating the system sees the drive
coming and going.


L R Nix
lornix@lornix.com

L R Nix wrote:

> zartoop wrote:
>
>>
>> Hey Loni,
>>
>> Thanks for your sage advice - I have fully stopped thinking:) (I am a
>> long time mac user after all!)
>>
>> I have done as suggested …
>>
>> Through Yast Partitioner removed the drive and fstab entry etc.
>>
>> But … slide a drive in - nothing on the desktop, nothing in mnt/ (or
>> anywhere else), no messages or alerts :frowning:
>>
>> The drive is in Yast and can be de/mounted that way but that’s a bit
>> kludgy
>>
>> Please help some more
>>
>>
>
> Ha ha! Didn’t mean it THAT way… don’t want a drone! {Smile}
>
> in a console, as root, try viewing the system log while inserting and
> removing the drive.
>
> tailf /var/log/messages
>
> Hopefully, there should be messages indicating the system sees the drive
> coming and going.
>

A thought… what filesystem is on the removable drive? ntfs? It’s possible
it’s not being automounted because linux sees an error on the filesystem, or
just that it was not umounted clean.

Well, the /var/log/messages would show that too.

Loni

L R Nix
lornix@lornix.com