Topic: Auto-mount a USB drive?

[Rick Jones]

Anyone got any neat schemes for auto-mounting a USB hard drive when plugged in? Also unmounting when unplugged to avoid bogus directories remaining?

The USB hotplugging all works, with the device being attached as /dev/sda1 (I'm assuming the drive will always be a single partition for this exercise).

So far I've manually added a line to fstab, with auto parameters, and hacked the scripts in /etc/hotplug to call mount -a after updfstab (the latter doesn't actually appear to do anything for USB devices).

This does achieve mount on plugin, but auto unmount could be a bit more tricky.

I just all seems a bit messy, I can't help thinking there must be a better way ... is there?

TIA
Rick

[Krusty]

It has been a while but i think this is it i will try it tonight when i get home and if it is wrong i will let you know but.....

in /mnt  mkdir cf (compact flash) or what ever you want
mount /dev/sda1  /mnt/cf
cd cf

This should get you where you want to be
 
modprobe sg
modprobe ide-scsi
modprobe usb-storage
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/cf

[Rick Jones]

Well, yes, I'm already doing that. But where I'm trying to get to is to have it happen simply as a result of physically plugging in the USB drive - with no command line intervention.

Plugging in fires a hotplug event, which will load the modules if required (that bit works!). With some tweaking I've got it also performing the mount, but it's all a bit hacky. By which I mean if there were a 2nd USB drive, or I inserted a drive with more than one partition, it wouldn't work, there'd need to be more script hacking.

There's also the drive-removal problem. The hot(un)plug cleanly releases the device, but the mount remains, so there is a mounted directory pointing at a device that no longer exists. It would be nice to have the removed devices unmount automatically. I can't see a good way to do that bit

Any further ideas welcome!

Rick.