On Wed, 18 Feb 2009 08:26:37 +0100 RedShift <redshift@pandora.be> wrote:
Preston C. wrote:
I think that this is a simple question. How do I mount an external hard drive before I log into my desktop? Thanks
You have been asking all these newbie questions while these have been widely covered by The Internets. I suggest you use an Internet Search Machine like google first (http://www.google.com/). The wiki (http://wiki.archlinux.org/) and the forum (http://bbs.archlinux.org/) are a good place to start as well. But your first reflex should be to read man mount...
Glenn
An external drive can be rather reliably identified and always mounted at the same place using udev. This is somewhat problematic on arch linux tough. For some reason the devices seem not to be created before mount runs although udev runs before it. This means that external drives do not get mounted along with all the other drives specified in fstab. I personally wonder what the problem is since this method has worked on other distributions. My workaround is simply another 'mount -a' in rc.local, at this point in boottime the devices are created. Still this doesn't work reliably with one of my drives but this is a separate problem (slowness). Philipp