[X-Unix] HD Mounting Trouble

[Tom Shaw]

At 6:36 PM -0600 2/1/05, Dave Higgins wrote:
>I'm having trouble with one particular HD not mounting properly. 
>Although this is not necessarily a UNIX problem, I'm hoping maybe 
>there will be a UNIX solution.
>
>What happens is this: An external (USB) HD will not re-mount when 
>rebooting into OS X. If I reboot into OS 9, it will mount. If it has 
>failed to mount in OS X when I move to OS 9, I have to wait for the 
>drive to run through a repair cycle (I presume that's what it is). 
>After a few minutes the HD will mount on OS 9. When I reboot into OS 
>X, it will mount at this point. But, if I have to reboot OS X for 
>any reason (be it my choice or forced to by lockup or installer), 
>the drive won't mount until going back into 9 again then back to X.
>
>When in OS X, but unable to mount, the drive does show up in Disk 
>Utility. The volume name, however, is greyed out. If I select it and 
>hit the "Mount" button, nothing happens. If I eject it there, then 
>unplug and re-plug in the USB cable, it will go back to the same 
>thing... USB drive unit shows, but volume doesn't mount. Disk 
>Utility will let me run a test/repair on it, and shows no problem.
>
>I've also thrown all the tests that Tech Tool Pro and Norton Disk 
>Doctor have at it, but all tests show no errors. Usually, when doing 
>this, of course, it has to un-mount the drive and it don't come back 
>until doing the double reboot dance again.
>
>It's not the fault of the USB case. I swap it out with another USB 
>case I have (different brand) and the problem swaps with the drive.
>
>I've tried studying the "mount" man page, along with the associated 
>files, but can't seem to come up with a proper solution, although 
>I'm still not that savvy when it comes to this type of UNIX works. 
>I've recorded what running just plain "mount" in Terminal gives me 
>both with the drive mounted and without it mounted. The missing line 
>when not mounted is:
>
>/dev/disk0s10 on /Volumes/Bonehead (local, nodev, nosuid, journaled)
>
>Anyone seen anything like this? Any suggestions? I'm hoping that 
>"mount" might do the trick with the right command string, but I just 
>don't know the right syntax to get it to work. Until I'm able to 
>copy it all over to another drive (it's a WD 250G that's pretty 
>full) and reformat it, I'd be willing to run a shell one-liner to 
>mount it after reboots (I basically leave it running all the time 
>anyway, so...).
>
>Thanks for any help and ideas.
>
>Dave.
>

Dave,

OS X does not honor the "s" flag ("s" for "set-id") on removable 
volumes, as that would mean someone could use a removable disk or 
drive to gain root privileges.

What is happening at the moment is the USB drive is being mounted with
the "nosuid" option (see the man page for mount). You can turn that 
off until the next reboot by doing the following:

sudo mount -uw "/Volumes/Bonehead"

To make this happen during startup you will have to create a startup 
script that runs as root during system startup. Mac OSX startup is 
exactly like OSX Sever in this case, so just follow the general 
instructions on

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107671

Note that you're running at root when you run durig startup

Make sure you setup your plist correctly.

Tom

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