Unmounted SATA HDD is still visible

[coverup]

Hi there,

 

I recently added a secondary SATA HDD to my old Mandrake 10.1 desktop. The drive is recognized as /dev/sda1 and is formatted as ext3 filesystem. MDK was unable to mount it properly on start up, and I added the following entry to /etc/fstab

 /dev/sda1 /backup ext3 umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,kudzu,codepage=850,noauto,exec,users 0 0

Despite that, the drive was painfully slow until I manually unmounted and mounted it with a command

mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /backup

After that I could read and write to the HDD OK. The problem is that I have to mount the drive manually after every reboot. If I don't, then

 

1. ls lists a different list of files on the drive from what should be there! I suspect those files were put there while the drive was not mounted properly

 

2. Why can I see anything at all on the partition /backup after it has been unmounted?

 

Here is what I mean

# mount
/dev/hda1 on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw)
/dev/hda6 on /home type ext3 (rw)
none on /mnt/floppy type supermount (rw,sync,dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850)
# ls /backup
a-Fri.tgz  a-Sat.tgz  a-Thu.tgz  a-Wed.tgz
a-Mon.tgz  a-Sun.tgz  a-Tue.tgz

Note that the partition /backup and device /dev/sda1 are not on the list of mounted partitions, yet ls /backup shows there are files on it! Where can I find those files? They disappear after the HDD is mounted manually.

[javaguy]

There's a /backup directory under your root partition. I expect you see whatever's there when the drive is unmounted. Then when you mount the drive under /backup, you see in /backup whatever's on the drive.

[coverup]

Ah, you are right! And I was wondering why / partition was nearly full! Thanks!

 

Now, can anybody tell what's wrong with the fstab entry? The drive does not mount on boot.

[K Bergen]

noauto, would be the culprit. :D

 

Ken

[coverup]

I tried removing noauto, and replacing with auto or with nothing. Both ways, I get an error:

mount: special device /dev/sda1 does not exist

How can this be fixed?

[jkerr82508]

Quick and easy solution might be to put the mount command in /etc/rc.d/rc.local (and add back the noauto option in fstab).

 

Jim

[coverup]

Quick and easy solution might be to put the mount command in /etc/rc.d/rc.local (and add back the noauto option in fstab).

 

Jim

In fact, I did try this method, but the drive did not mount anyway - don't know why....