Thanks for bringing this back to the topic Tom. The device doesn't have a specific driver for Linux. Interestingly, on the box, the Linux support has been scrubbed out with a thick black pen, although it still says its supported in the manual (hmm....). Anyway, as I said again earlier, the problem still exists using eject. Peter. On Thu, 12 Dec 2002 09:44 pm, Tom Emerson wrote:
* Bryan Tyson <bryantyson@earthlink.net> [12-11-02 18:27]:
Thank you. How does this help the original problem of the /dev designation incrementing each time he umounts and mounts the USB disk?
to which "SuSEnixER" reiterated:
The specific question he asked and I answered was:
Could you please explain what determines when one should use eject vs. umount?
I don't mean to unneccessarilly fan the flames here, but the overal subject has to do with "solid state" hard drives [flash ram w/usb interfaces] -- it'd be a neat trick to get the hardware to actually "open the tray" of a USB based flash memory device :)
But, to get everyone on the same page: 1) the original poster (peter) noted a problem where every time he re-mounted a "solid state" hard drive [flash ram], the system would increment the actual "mount point" used -- i.e., from /media/sda1 to /media/sdb1, /media/sdc1, and so on. 2) I asked if he was explicitly "umount"ing the device before removing it -- thinking perhaps if the drive wasn't explicitly unmounted, perhaps the system would consider the device "still in use" when it was plugged in the second time, and thus allocated the next available "sd" mountpoint -- IN REVIEWING the messages, it appears I'm at fault for redirecting the discussion from the "/media/sdxx" to "/dev/sdxx" designations -- trivial though that may be, it appears to actually be a pivotal part of this discussion 3) "Cees Van de Griend" suggested an explicit "eject" versus a simple "umount", with no explanation as to why this might be the better thing to do, which prompted the question "when should one use 'eject' instead of merely 'umount'?" 3a) Cees responded with the fact that "eject" does a little more "deallocation" than a mere "umount" [and SuSEnixER pounted out that in the case where mechanical devices are concerned, this physically causes the media to be "ejected" from the device]
So here we are -- Peter has an odd problem which I'm beginning to suspect is related specifically to the 'winfast usb disk" device and/or driver. Like someone else mentioned, I too have a digital camera that appears to be a usb "flash ram" device [sony handycam w/memory stick] and so far as I can tell, it always re-allocates the same /dev/sd and /media/sd mountpoints. I don't know offhand if the "winfast" device has a specific driver (module) defined for it or if it uses a "generic"USB memory device driver. [I'm guessing here that there is a specific module for it, and I'm willing to bet if you went through the code you'd find it increments the '/media/sdx" device name when it writes the entry to /etc/fstab]