Cannot automount a custom volume from USB drive at boot time

[oberger]

Hi.

I want to mount an external drive's volume automaticall upon boot, with its UUID, with something like :

Code:

UUID=cff8ea48-77a4-455c-81b0-6df544fb12ac     /mnt/testbackups      ext3    defaults,auto        0       0

But the disk is not found at boot time.

I believe the USB device detection takes too long, or happens after the mounting of fstab's volumes.

It's even worth if I ask for it to be fsck-ed with a last number changed to "2", in which case, the fsck reports a missing volume and aborts the boot.

Of course, from the command line at the end of the boot, mount -a works

Any suggestions ?

[rooster]

you might need to add to your uboot bootcmd rootdelay=10, since some external HDD come with standby timeout turned on and it takes some time for the drive to spin up and kernel to notice it.
The 10 seconds timeout will let the drive enough time to spinup and kernel should find it.

[restamp]

Rooster, while we are on this topic, I have a couple questions about rootdelay:

1.  I had thought the delay only applied to waiting for the root file system to become available, but I guess that is not the case, right?

2.  Does rootdelay=10 force a 10-second delay, or does it impose a delay of up to 10 seconds while waiting for a disk to become available?

Thanks.

[obarthelemy]

1. if I got that right, it's a 10s delay before loading the root fs, which goes first, so everyrhitng else gets delayed as a result

2. always 10s, even if root fs become available before.

[rooster]

obarthelemy is right, the notion of using the roodelay is mostly used to wait for the root device to spin up (in cased of USB HD) and in SD cards for linux to recognise the device.
I assume that if mount -a works it might be that the drive was not in working shape when kernel was loading the SATA driver.

[oberger]

It seems this topic has already been addressed :
http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=485.0

However, I'm not so much pleased with having no standard solution to this problem. It's weird that no one has already packaged a solution for such case in Debian...

Will continue investigating.

[oberger]

Btw, I suggest to continue discussing in http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=485.0.

I'll add a few more findings there.