Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 52264
will not mount 100MB disk in 250MB drive
Last modified: 2014-03-16 22:22:56 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.6-3.1 i686) Description of problem: The kudzu line for an Iomega 250MB Zip drive uses /dev/hdc4 for that device. It works for 250MB disks but not for 100MB disks. 100MB disks are mountable on /dev/hdc instead, but that is not what kudzu gives. (Maybe this is not really a kudzu bug.) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.You should get this line in fstab: /dev/hdc4 /mnt/zip250.0 auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0 2.put 100MB in 250MB Zip drive 3.mount /mnt/zip250.0 Actual Results: > mount /mnt/zip250.0 /dev/hdc4: No such file or directory mount: you must specify the filesystem type > mount /dev/hdc4 /mnt/zip250.0 /dev/hdc4: Success mount: you must specify the filesystem type > mount -t ext2 /dev/hdc4 /mnt/zip250.0 mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc4, or too many mounted file systems (could this be the IDE device where you in fact use ide-scsi so that sr0 or sda or so is needed?) Using /dev/hdc instead of /dev/hdc4 works: > mount /dev/hdc /mnt/zip250.0 (Mounting a 250MB in the same drive works without problem.) Additional info: This occured on a Dell Latitude laptop computer with the Zip drive in the modular bay.
How is the 100MB disk partitioned?
It is unpartitioned. In addition, when the 100MB disk is in, "fdisk /dev/hdc4" gives "Unable to read /dev/hdc4", but "fdisk /dev/hdc" works. And when the 250MB disk is in, "fdisk /dev/hdc" gives "Unable to open /dev/hdc", but "fdisk /dev/hdc4" works. When the fdisk command works, the following warning is encountered: Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable.
That's the problem. The initial entry is set up for partitioned disks (i.e., fs on fourth partition. If you put in an unpartitioned disk, you will get an error.
The 250MB disk is not partitioned either. It makes little sense to have fstab put that disk in /dev/hdc4, but since it works, that seems ok. But why does that work? Why is the default behavior to assume there is a partition number 4? It seems to be a poor choice to force users to know about disk partitioning when all they want to do is write to the disk.
factory formatted disks come with everything on partition 4. dunno why, it's an iomega quirk.
Is it possible to generate two lines in fstab, one for the 4th partition and one for the unpartitioned disk? Well, that's not really necessary. What is needed is the change of ownership when a user logs in at the console.