mounting USB drives

[Robin Laing]

Marcel Janssen wrote:
> On Tuesday 04 October 2005 19:03, Robin Laing wrote:
> 
>>FC4 on three machines.  Plug USB device in and it mounts.  Icon on
>>desktop for the drive.  Right click to unmount.  Cannot be any easier
>>than that.  Heck it is easier that on WinXP where I have to find the
>>correct little icon on the task bar and hope that I just unmounted the
>>correct drive.  Fresh installs.
> 
> 
> I have one fresh installed machine but kept the home directory intact.
> The above does not work on my machine and I wonder why and how I can make it 
> work.
> 
> Regards,
> Marcel
> 
Funny that you should mention that the "home" directory is intact.  In 
the home directory there are some sub directories that affect 
applications and features.  I learned the hard way that this can 
really screw up an installation.

I was just talking to one of our IS people about the problem of moving 
home data between versions and how these .* directories can cause 
problems.

My technique for moving to a new installation is.

1.  All data is stored in a "data" directory by default.
2.  All .* and other directories are then copied to a sub directory in 
the data directory.
3.  Clean install.
4.  Create the users account and then as root, slowly compare and copy 
the various .* directories to the home directory.

I do this as configuration files keep changing between versions, I 
have found this is safer.  It ensures that menus are consistent and 
all the applications are loaded.  It was a big issue for me going from 
RH8 to FC1 and it took months to get it straightened out.

At home it took about 1hr to get my account straightened out as I do 
allot of things.  I was surprised about the number of files that were 
not needed or files that had changed with the same name.

This is from experience.

-- 
Robin Laing