Confused about /media

[John Summerfield]

On Thu, 2004-11-18 at 07:04 -0500, Paul Tomblin wrote:
> I have an external USB drive with two partitions, one ext3 for backing
> up my Linux box, and one FAT for when I want to move files between my
> different computers.  Formerly I had entries in /etc/fstab so that I
> could mount them as needed, but now I find that when I boot they're
> mounted in /media automagically.  That's ok, I guess, but I have a
> couple of questions about that.
> 
> 1. The ext3 partition is /media/usbdrive, which is fine.  The fat
> partition, however, is /media/I__E_L_____ (it looks like that on a
> text display, it looks worse on the console - all question marks and
> those square blocks you get with unicode characters when the font
> can't handle them).   Is there a way to give that partition a more
> meaningful name?
> 
> 2. If I need to power down the drive or unplug it, do I need to
> unmount it, or is whatever mounted it also responsible for
> automatically unmounting it?

Don't just pull the plug.

try ejecting the base device. For example
eject /dev/sda
With any sort of luck this will umount the partitions and you'll be able
to remove the drive.

If you're in KDE or Gnome you may need to use the icons to unmount them.

It seems that some hardware needs the eject, otherwise next time the
drive appears at sdb, sdc etc.