On Fri, 2006-05-19 at 12:03 -0600, David G. Miller wrote: > Jacob (=Jouk) Jansen wrote: > > >> > How to change this? This USB disk is mounted automatically when pluged > >> > in. I cannot edit fstab since than the machine fails to boot when the > >> > disk is not present. > > > What directories are on the external drive that cause your system not to > boot if it isn't present? Or is it just that fstab has an entry for the > drive? If this is the case, a simple solution might be to just add > "noauto" to the mount options in fstab. This just causes the system to > not attempt to automatically mount the device at boot. Attaching the > drive after boot should still result in it being automounted. You might > also want to look at the "user" and "users" options to mount since these > allow a user to mount the device (user) and any user to unmount the > device (users). Remember that some machines will try to boot a USB drive FIRST if it sees one plugged in. This is a BIOS setting on the machine. Go into the BIOS and make sure USB drives are the LAST thing it looks at. My boot sequences are generally: 1. Try the floppy 2. Try the CD/DVD 3. Try the hard drive 4. Try the USB devices 5. Try a network boot ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer rstevens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - - VitalStream, Inc. http://www.vitalstream.com - - - - There are only 10 kinds of people in the world -- those who - - understand binary and those who don't - ----------------------------------------------------------------------
