External Hard Drive Problem during Boot

[chazdg]

I installed Mandrake 9.2 but my external USB hard drive did not mount during installation. I was able to mount it after install. However, during reboot, I get a failed message for mounting the /dev/sda1 device "device not available". I can then go back into the Quikdisk? or Mandrake Control Center and remount the drive and then be able to access it. How do I correct this problem so that the drive is mounted during the boot process? Thanks.

[mrBen]

What type of external drive is it? USB or SCSI?

It is quite possible that the problem is because the USB hotplug system is setup after the /etc/fstab table is read, and thus the drive is not actually ready at the time when the other drives are being prepared.

It should be a reasonably simple matter to add in a small script to mount the drive seperately after boot, but you'd also need to set it up in the fstab not to try and mount it at startup.

[chazdg]

It a USB (Maxtor) hard drive. So your suggesting not to mount the hard drive at all during boot and mount it after. Thats about what I am doing now, I think. What would such a script look like - I have no experience with that sort of thing. Thanks again.

[mrBen]

Something along the lines of:


#!/bin/bash

mount /usbdrive



should do the trick ;) Basically just use a normal mount command. If you have it setup in /etc/fstab, then you should just be able to use the mount command with the mount point.

Then you will need to add it to the startup routines - see your distros documentation for doing that. (Or check RedHats if Mandy doesn't cover it)