[LUNI] Newbie USB HDD question

[Brian]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 2:37 PM, jpodraza <jpodraza at wdsd7.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  I have an external HDD drive (SimpleDrive - USB 2.0 - 250GB
>  - vfat) connected to an email server running Red Hat
>  Enterprise Linux ES release 4 (Nahant Update 6).
>
>  When I boot up the server, the HDD can be mounted as
>  /dev/sdc1.  Over the course of a day or two, it will move to
>  /dev/sdd1 and /dev/sde1.
>
>  I put this line in /etc/fstab:
>
>  /dev/sdc1  /mnt/exthdd  vfat  defaults  0 0
>
>  That didn't stop it.
>
>  I added similar lines for /dev/sdd1 and /dev/sde1.  This
>  helped in that the HDD remained mounted after shifting, but
>  eventually it disconnects completely.  I don't know if it
>  moves on to /dev/sdf1 and beyond.
>
>  Restarting the server brings it back to /dev/sdc1.  I would
>  like to get this stable.  I have some cron jobs that back up
>  parts of the server to this HDD.

With most Linux-supported filesystems, you can mount by UUID instead
of device. Try typing "blkid" as root to get the UUID of the device.
Then, make an entry in fstab using the UUID instead of the device
name. An example line in fstab will look something like this:

UUID=12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789ab /mnt/exthdd ext3 defaults 0 0

vfat throws a wrench in the works. It doesn't (so far as I know!) have
a UUID. But the good news is that it does carry a label, and mount can
search for that as well. Try renaming the volume to something
meaningful, then replacing UUID= above with LABEL=whatever and you
should be good to go.