running shell scripts from external USB disk

[Rick Stevens]

On Fri, 2006-05-19 at 12:03 -0600, David G. Miller wrote:
> Jacob (=Jouk) Jansen wrote:
> 
> >> > How to change this? This USB disk is mounted automatically when pluged
> >> > in. I cannot edit fstab since than the machine fails to boot when the
> >> > disk is not present.
> >
> What directories are on the external drive that cause your system not to 
> boot if it isn't present?  Or is it just that fstab has an entry for the 
> drive?  If this is the case, a simple solution might be to just add 
> "noauto" to the mount options in fstab.  This just causes the system to 
> not attempt to automatically mount the device at boot.  Attaching the 
> drive after boot should still result in it being automounted.  You might 
> also want to look at the "user" and "users" options to mount since these 
> allow a user to mount the device (user) and any user to unmount the 
> device (users).

Remember that some machines will try to boot a USB drive FIRST if it
sees one plugged in.  This is a BIOS setting on the machine.  Go into
the BIOS and make sure USB drives are the LAST thing it looks at.  My
boot sequences are generally:

	1. Try the floppy
	2. Try the CD/DVD
	3. Try the hard drive
	4. Try the USB devices
	5. Try a network boot

----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-     There are only 10 kinds of people in the world -- those who    -
-                 understand binary and those who don't              -
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