USB drives

[Michael Scully]

Greetings:

	I have been using various USB-connected hard drives, by deleting the
factory NTFS partitions and creating ext3 partitions on them instead.  I use
these for layered backups of my key application directory, with storage for
every night's snapshot for years at a time.  But I'm never quite sure how to
keep the drives mounted at reboot, unless I manually create a mount point
and mount command in rc.local.

	I can always see the drive shown in the Gnome desktop's "Computer"
folder.  Clicking on it will mount it immediately, using /media/mydrivelabel
(from the label I assigned the drive using e2label).  But the mount point is
dynamically created and removed from hotplug events.  Is there a way to
configure this to automount at boot time, but use the hotplug conventions?
In the event someone unplugs it by accident and then plugs it back in, I
want it to end up mounted consistently, so my backup scripts always find it.

	For that matter, since a hotplug event always handles things
correctly, is there a reason that system boot DOESN'T do the same actions?

	My platforms these days are RHEL 5 on Intel.

Scully