OH DEAR

[Maurice Murphy]

Hi Jean-François,

Well, I'm back again with Feisty and am generally speaking very happy 
(my only other problem is my inability to install my webcam).  I tried 
your first possible solution to my removable disk problem without 
success.  I am reluctant to try your second solution for a couple of 
reasons: first as a newbie, I might muck things up and be unable to 
recover, more importantly, however, I don't think I'm getting to the 
root of the matter.

Why would Feisty complain that my removable drive needs to be checked?  
I have run it under Windows XP and given it a chkdsk, which it passes 
with flying colours.  In Ubuntu I have run ntfsfix on it and, again, all 
appears well, with lots of okays and a final statement of success.

Yet this drive originally worked just fine under Edgy (not so now) 
without the need to 'force' mount it.  Can you think of any way that I 
could get around this?  My original line in fstab was:

/dev/sdb5 /media/windows ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.utf8

and now is:

/dev/sdb5 /media/windows ntfs-3g defaults,force 0 0

The only thing I can think of doing is to reformat the removable drive, 
but since it contains ALL my valuable backup data, you can understand 
that I am most reluctant to do this, with the inherent need of copying 
everything to another ntfs drive, reformatting and then copying 
everything back again -- not a trivial task!  But I will do this as a 
last resort, if necessary.  What do you think?  I wouldn't blame you if 
something went wrong!

Or do you think I should report this as a bug?  I can live with it, as I 
rarely turn off this computer, so it's no big deal :-)

Many thanks for your help and advice,

Maurice

Jean-François Gagnon Laporte wrote:
> Hi Maurice,
>
> On 4/27/07, Maurice Murphy <m1625 at rogers.com> wrote:
>   
>> Well, I gave Feisty a real good try!  Unfortunately, it didn't like my
>> HP removable drive in read/write mode.  Every time I did a reboot, it
>> changed the address of this drive from /dev/sdb5 to /dev/sdc5 and vice
>> versa requiring me to constantly change fstab.  As there seemed to be
>> little other difference for me between Edgy and Feisty, I reinstalled
>> the latter.
>>     
> I can suggest two options for fixing this behavior that I would try in
> order of complexity :
>
>  1 - Write your fstab so that it uses the uuid of the drive instead of
> the device node. They are available here : ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/
>
>  2 - You could write an udev rule that would freeze your device name
> to an arbitrary name of your choosing like "/dev/hpdrive". Here's a
> link for a quick and well written howto by dsd :
> http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html
>
> However, I find it odd that hal-dev-manager in gnome (I don't remember
> the exact name of the daemon though) doesn't automatically mount your
> removable drive without hacking your fstab.
>
> Hope this helps
>
>   
>> Everything is working fine again, except I've had no success in
>> installing my Logitech Quickcam Messenger webcam either with Feisty or
>> Edgy.  I've tried about everything I can find, but to no avail.  If
>> anyone has a brilliant idea for success on this front, it would be most
>> appreciated.  Boy that would make me truly happy!  :-)  :-)  :-)
>>     
>
> You will have more success of eventually making your webcam work by
> using feisty than edgy since it has a newer kernel. As far as making
> it work I really don't have any clue for you sorry.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Jean-Francois
>
>   

-- 
I use Ubuntu 7.04...
ubuntu - linux for human beings <http://www.ubuntu.com>