On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Leslie Katz wrote: > Until recently, I usually booted up with a USB flash drive plugged into > one of my USB ports. I had no complaints about how it worked. > > Recently, I installed a USB hard drive, after which I usually booted up > with the USB flash drive plugged into one of my USB ports and the USB > hard drive plugged into another of my USB ports. > > On the USB hard drive are stored crucial files for my email client, > Thunderbird. > > Recently, I booted up and started Thunderbird. I was told that a > crucial file could not be found and that a new version of it would be > created. I then realised that I'd booted up without my USB flash drive > being plugged in, though my USB hard drive had been plugged in. I found > and deleted the new crucial file, which had been created on one of my > internal IDE hard drives, plugged in the USB flash drive and rebooted. > Everything in Thunderbird went back to normal. > > I do not understand why the absence of my USB flash drive caused > Thunderbird not to find a crucial file on my plugged-in USB hard drive. > > Is there something I may do so that Thunderbird will work properly > whether or not the USB flash drive is plugged in on booting-up? > > I should add that my kernel version is 2.6.12-1.1378.
USB drives (and SCSI drives in general) are assigned letter names in the order they are discovered: the first becomes /dev/sda, the second becomes /dev/sdb, and so on. If a drive is missing, then all the later drives will get shifted down by a letter. So if you were set up to mount the plugged-in hard drive as /dev/sdb, and absence of the flash drive caused the hard drive to become /dev/sda instead, you can see where the problem arose. There are two things you can do about this. One is, like Stephen Gowdy suggested, to use partition labels rather than device names in /etc/fstab. Then the device name won't matter since the label will match. The other approach is to create a udev script to assign fixed device names to your USB drives, in addition to the usual sda, sdb, etc. Then put the fixed names in /etc/fstab instead of the usual names. See the udev documentation for more information. Alan Stern ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7637&alloc_id=16865&op=click _______________________________________________ [email protected] To unsubscribe, use the last form field at: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-usb-users
