USB Flash Disk and Supermount, Can and can't do?

[Darkelve]

This post is a re-construction of a previously deleted post. The posts are represented by the quotes and the authors of the posts are put in a larger font inside each quote.

 

jeanackle

Hi everyone,

 

A long time since I last came here...

Anyway, I'm still asking newbie questions (and probably will foreever, so...) B)

 

I've got one of them USb flash disks and back in Mdk 9.1 I had to mount/unmount it manually (the advantage was I could do it as a normal user).

 

Now, with 10.0, it gets mounted with Supermount, which brings up two questions:

1. Do I need to unmount it before I plug it out, or is it just like a floppy/cd now?

2. If I MUST unmount it, will it be alright to add the "user" option in /etc/fstab?

 

Thanks for your help

 

:)

 

arthur

yes absolutely. removing a filesystem without unmounting it may have dire consequences which I fortunately have never encountered. Try it at your own risk. Even windows doesn't like it if you unplug devices without telling the computer.

 

Just right click the icon in Gnome, then select 'unmount volume' and it's done. I don't use KDE, but it should be similar. 10.0 does not use supermount but rather magicdev or something, but there's still an /mnt/removable in fstab that you can tweak. You probably don't need to edit it anyway...

 

edit: 10.0 still has supermount support, but is it complemented/replaced by magicdev? I'm not sure...

 

This post has been edited by arthur: Oct 23 2004, 12:24 AM

 

DragonMage

I think all mandrake kernels have supermount patches in it. I even think that supermount will still be there in Mandrake 10.1.

 

Anyway, what I think supermount does is poll the device every couple of minutes or so. Therefore, if the device doesn't have anything to mount, then it will umount it automatically. This is why with supermount, you can still eject your cdrom while the cd is still "supposedly" mounted (as long as you don't have any applications that access the cd).

 

Magicdev for me, is just one half of supermount. It detects the device when it is inserted and then if it is mountable, then it will mount it automatically (or use an appropriate applications such as kscd for audio cd or k3b for blank cd-r). But it doesn't poll the device every few minutes like supermount does. So you still have to umount the device manually before ejecting or unplugging device.

 

So with supermount enabled on the device, you can just unplug the USB key disk without any side effects. Just make sure you close all applications accessing the USB key disk first. Personally, I put magicdev for all my cd-rom based devices (CDRW, DVD-ROM, DVD-RW) and supermount for floppies and USB key disk.

 

jeanackle

 

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

In the meantime, the Supermount README says it automatically mounts the inserted media with the proppoer fs type as a subfs.

 

Somehow, it still seems to me there is some more to it. Because /dev/sda1 (/mnt/removable) isn't even in the /etc/fstab, but it automatically gets into /etc/mtab when I plug the pen in. So, the mount point itself (the "superfs")doesn't exist before the hardware gets plugged in. Is this done by supermount somehow? Magicdev maybe? Something else?

 

BTW, I don't use KDE either, and that operation in GNOME doens't work anymore in 10.0 (it worked in 9.1 back when it was mounted fs=auto and the option "user" was on.

 

Well, for the moment, I guess the following seems like a good idea:

(DragonMage @ Oct 23 2004, 03:57 PM)

I put magicdev for all my cd-rom based devices (CDRW, DVD-ROM, DVD-RW) and supermount for floppies and USB key disk.

 

 

BTW, i suppose you actually tested this (the part I "boldified"... B)

 

rgonzale

I'm having a similar problem with a new Mandrake 10 installation: if I reboot with my usb "key" inserted and my external usb hard disk attached, then they both appear properly: /mnt/removable and /mnt/removable2. magicdev appears to insert supermount entries into /mnt/fstab. However, if I remove the usb key drive, it is not umounted, and if I umount it myself I also have to manually mount it next time I insert it.

 

In contrast, on my workmate's Mandrake 10 box, I can insert the usb key and each time a new entry appears in fstab and disappears automatically when I remove the usb key.

 

I don't know why my magicdev doesn't work except at reboot.

 

-Ralph

 

aRTee

 

Mdk10.1 finally got things fixed as to usb storage - in my 9.2 review you can see the fix for decent speeds with supermount - mount by hand.

 

Now in 10.1 it actually mounts the partition, as if you had done that by hand, all is well.

Furthermore, you can umount it as any user, so you know for sure things are ok.

 

With supermount, you don't have to umount the drive, but you can do

sync

to make sure any buffers get flushed to disk/memstick before unplugging.

That prevents any file system corruption and ensures that all write actions finish on the spot. It doesn't hurt to do that command twice:

sync

sync

=- this is what I used to do when I still used / ran a system using supermount.

 

BTW supermount is still there for floppies...