Hi Don, I use firewire drives on my systems regularly. For exactly the problem you describe I have gotten into the habit of simply mounting the drives by hand every time I reboot the system. At some point I had a little script that automatically loaded the necessary modules and then mount the drive when back in 8.0 and 8.1 the modules didn't load automatically. Since 8.2 (perhaps even 8.1, I forgot) the modules load fine, and in principle it should be possible to put the entry into /etc/fstab. Since it is a removeable drive and I do sometimes remove it I have not put it into /etc/fstab. Furthermore, I believe that in order for it to work properly one would have to make sure that the relevant firewire modules are loaded *before* the harddrives in /etc/fstab get mounted. NOw, to get to your case: I would try to modify the fstab entry to noauto, so that it doesn't automatically try to mount it on boot-up. A couple of weeks ago we had a similar discussion and you might be able to find relevant information in the archives. Then you ought to be able to mount it later from a root account simply by a command like "mount /firewire" or similar. It might also be possible to write a little script that tests for the presence of the drive first and then mounts it automatically if it is detected. I haven't looked into this myself. Otherwise, simply mount it with mount /dev/sdx1 /firewire (x being a, b, or whatever device it usually sits on). The real problem that I have found when using two firewire drives at the same time is that when you take one off, properly unmounted first, of course, it messes up the other one which will then choke with a journaling error and require you to reiserfsck it before resuming operation with it. I was hoping that this would be corrected in future versions of the kernel. Since I haven't upgraded my home system yet, I obviously can't tell. Right now I am having extreme trouble upgrading 8.2 to 9.0 on one of my office machines (failed after 3 different approaches). I'll probably post a message about that ordeal once I have either solved it or gotten to a point where I am completely stuck. At this point I have to admit that this upgrade has been the hardest ever since I have bought SuSE (since 5.2). Best regards, Alex. On Sat, 8 Nov 2003, Donald Henson wrote:
I have a problem with my firewire-connected removable hard drives. The drives were originally used in a Windows XP system but have been reformated using the Reiser file system for use in a SuSE Linux 9.0 environment. Once mounted, the drives work fine, mounted one at a time. The problem is more of an irritant than a real problem but I would like to get it fixed anyway. The problem is that on reboot, the firewire-connected drives fail the reiserfsck. I then have to go to maintenance mode, remount the root filesystem, and delete the sda1 entry in fstab. A reboot then works normally except that, of course, the drive is not mounted. One item that may be important is that I originally set up the system with one removable hard drive and then switched to another drive of the same brand and type. And no I don't remember whether the problem first appeared then or not. I was up to my eyeballs in other problems at the time. Second part of the problem...
I haven't been able to figure out how to use the mount command to mount the drives. (I could use some help on that, as well.) Thus far, I've been using the YaST partitioner to mount the drive to /external1. After that, everything works until the next time I reboot. I have a feeling that the partitioner is not the correct way to mount the drives but, on the other hand, it should work.
Any assistance will be sincerely appreciated.
Don Henson