Automounting issues

[Renegadeoftech]

I am running Ubuntu 8.10 Intrebid Ibex and aside from having to compile my own wireless drivers have had little trouble. However, I've noticed that while everything else (optical media, sd card) mounts when inserted that my usb drive doesn't and tells me I have invalid mount options when I double click to mount it.

This means I have to go to the terminal and type in "sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/cdrom0" which gives me read access but tells me I need root access to write to it. So I have to use the terminal and mv command to save stuff to it.

The contents of /etc/fstab are here http://pastebin.com/m79fd6fbb

[coroner]

What I would do is try something like this in /etc/fstab:
/dev/sdb1 /media/usb auto user,noauto,exec,utf8,uid=<UID>,gid=<GID> 0 0

The auto option in the filesystem type field automatically detects the filesystem type, regardless if it's vfat or iso9660 so if you have a USB CDROM, this would make more sense making the mount point /media/usb or whatever you like, depending on the initial directory permissions of /mnt/usb you may also want to use fmask and dmask.

Try that see what you get.

[coroner]

If you still experience problems related to your setup or a specific configuration which you would rather have, look into:
http://afuse.sourceforge.net/

It is an automounter that uses FUSE, Filesystems in USErspace.

This might be slightly more flexible than what I see you having had setup above.

Also, you might look at: man mount

There are options there which will allow mount to tolerate sloppy mount options, instead of fail mounting the device completely. Now this doesn't mean that you can specify the wrong filesystem type and it will still mount it. I will have to assume the SD card has an NTFS partition and the USB device has FAT32 partition. The differences between these filesystems are much, so other than afuse I can only suggest using options for BOTH, filesystems such as NTFS mount options like uid and gid, and for vfat.

The option specifically is -s, have a look:

       -s     Tolerate  sloppy  mount  options  rather than failing. This will
              ignore mount options not supported by a filesystem type. Not all
              filesystems  support this option. This option exists for support
              of the Linux autofs-based automounter.

This allows for specifying mount options for several filesystem types, but you must use auto in the filesystem type field so mount can check the superblock magic for which filesystem type it is.

Now understand Linux is flexible, the fstab is not the only way you can mount yoru filesystems. If you wanted to, you could write a very simple script to loop through different options for filesystems and filesystem types executing the script from rc.local which is in /etc/rc.d