mounting USB disk with fstab

[axaf]

Hi-

I have a USB hard drive which I occasionally use with my FC6 system. Is it valid to enter this into the fstab file if the device isn't necessarily powered up all the time? My system doesn't seem to want to auto detect the disk. Shouldn't it?

I want non-root users to have access to the disk.

Thanks.

[LinuxTom]

Yes perfectly acceptable to do that assuming that the system is actually able to access the drive. I assume that you mean it is accessible, but it does not automount for whatever reason.

You can try something like this...

/dev/sdc2 /media/sdc2 ext3 rw,noauto,user,exec 0 0

That will allow non-root users to mount/unmount the drive. Of course if you have multible storage devices, that you randomly swap, the mount point may shift, and in that case, you may need to create a /etc/udev/rules.d/10-local.rules file for udev, such as this...

BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sd*", SYSFS{serial}=="57442D5743414C3736393837303631", NAME="%k", SYMLINK+="wd-external%n"

Altering the SYSFS{serial} and SYMLINK+ values according to your particular drive, then using the symlink created as your device entry in your fstab. But that's another issue, and if you have only the one USB drive, probably not an issue.