USB 'disk drives'

[Mark Komarinski]

On Thu, Nov 07, 2002 at 05:49:50PM -0500, ken at flyingtoasters.net wrote:
> > I'd love to setup the thing to automount but can't do that if I can't
> > mount  it at all! Has anyone already wrestled this alligator and figured
> > out how  to use it? If not I'll dive into research mode and learn more
> > about using  USB things with Linux.
> 
> Weellll...  generally, mount is "smart" enough to know which type of
> filesystem to use.  Assuming you've tried both "vfat" and "msdos", and
> neither has worked, I begin to wonder if your kernel is compiled with
> support for them.  Do you have a custom kernel?  Have you tried manually
> insmod-ing vfat.o, and then mounting?  If you have a custom kernel, I do
> suggest you check and make sure that you had "msdos" or "vfat" selected
> when you compiled.  If in doubt, compile a new one.  The hard part with
> USB devices is getting the system to recognize them; after that, it's
> generally pretty easy.  Lastly, though, I suggest doing an "fdsik
> /dev/sda", and making sure it's "sda" you want, and not, say, "sda1"
> (though based on experience, what you're going with is generally right).

Thanks to the way that SCSI is handled under Linux, it is almost impossible
to automount a removable SCSI device.  You can never guarantee how the
device will show up.

I have a box with both USB and Firewire drives.  While you can (sort of)
know when the machine first comes up what the assignments will be, after
that point, you can never know.  As soon as you unplug the device and
plug it back in, you may get a different assignment (/dev/sdb) or
the same assignment (/dev/sda). 

-Mark