USB drives mount question

Graeme Nichols gnichols at tpg.com.au
Fri Jan 7 04:18:29 UTC 2005


On Thu, 2005-01-06 at 10:58, Rick Stevens wrote:
> Ken Scott wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > I have several USB flash drives and a USB harddrive.  Does anyone know
> > why When I plug these things in the reported dev sometimes differs. 
> > Sometimes it is /dev/sda or sda1 or sdb.  What is the  rule here?  I
> > also noticed that it works differently on different distros running on
> > the same hardware.  The same stick is assigned different devices in
> > different distros even though it is plugged into the slot. Anybody know
> > why?
> 
> Depends on the udev system and the distro you're using.
> 
> Firewire and USB devices are treated as though they were SCSI devices,
> so they show up as "/dev/sdXp" ("sd" meaning "SCSI disk").  The "X"
> indicates which SCSI disk the system detected it as.  The first
> device is "sda", the second "sdb" and so on.  Different kernels will
> scan the USB, firewire and SCSI buses in different orders, so the name
> may vary.
> 
> The "p" above indicates the _partition_ number on the drive.  So,
> "/dev/sda" refers to the ENTIRE drive, while "/dev/sda1" refers to the
> first partition on the drive, just like disks.

Rick is absolutely correct. It also depends on the sequence in which you
plugged them in and whether or not they were plugged in when you booted
the machine. At least my machine, a Medion 8083 with a P4 processor
running FC2, kernel 2.6.6 varies as I've said as did my previous
machine, an Athlon 650Mhz running RH8. The partition number SHOULD
always be the same regardless of which disk number it is recognised as.

--
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Kind regards, Graeme Nichols.
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Profanity is the one language all programmers know best.
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