[X-Unix] External drive volume doesn't automount?

[William H. Magill]

On 06 May, 2005, at 17:24, Kevin Stevens wrote:
> I've just migrated my server installation from a G5 with internal  
> drives,
> running 10.3, to a Mac Mini with an external FireWire drive,  
> running 10.4.
> There are two partitions on the external drive, a 40GB OS X partition
> which is RAID mirrored with the internal Mini disk, and a 200GB data
> partition.
>
> The problem I'm having is that the data partition doesn't mount
> automatically when the Mini is restarted.  If you log in to the  
> Desktop,
> it mounts - it's immediately visible on the Desktop and available in
> Finder, shows up as /Volumes/Data, and works fine.  However, if you
> restart, just leave the machine at the login prompt, and SSH into the
> Mini, the volume isn't mounted.  This isn't just a matter of it
> automounting on first access, as I have log entries for various  
> daemons
> that complain they can't access it.  The OS X mirror partition  
> mounts at
> startup as expected.
>
> So, two things:  how do I fix it (perhaps some setting under  
> "mounts" in
> NetInfo Manager?), and why is it doing this?  I've never used an  
> external
> drive before, don't know if this is an external drive thing, a Tiger
> thing, or just an odd thing.

1- If you are running OS X Server, this should not be happening.

2- If you are running OSX Client, then this is expected behavior  
since about 10.2

To change the default behavior of foreign disks:

For panther it was discussed here:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031103155828117

I haven't looked for at the issue under Tiger. Under Tiger, home  
directories on external volumes, i.e. FireWire drives, simply work.  
Implying that the default was again changed, but I have not explored  
why it works. I installed Tiger on an clean internal partition and  
then used the setup assistant to copy stuff over. The process very  
nicely copied my old sym-links for the home directories an everything  
was "just there" as expected.


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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