Talk:mount

From NetBSD Wiki

Can anyone explain why we mount usb thumb drives to /dev/sd0e/ but we can't mount to /dev/sd0a? Perhaps someone knows where the relevant documentation is.

Also I wanted to mention that I had to be root to mount the thumb drive, and su didn't work, so maybe that should be mentioned as well. Something like: Some systems require root access to mount any file system. For more information on this security feature please visit net.bsd.foo.bar.com

ggm 9/5/08

most thumb drives are formatted with a non-unix partition. the insertion causes a temporary disk label
to be made, which has to make choices about mapping into the older BSD <letter> name model.

A is where people expect to find UFS/FFS/LFS class, first-class UNIX filesystems. If the thumbdrive has
one (eg if you wipe it, and/or reformat it first) then it is entirely possible you WILL see a mount on /a work
but the phony disklabel has put the MSDOS format partition onto "e" because thats where most people who
have multiboot expect to see it. It can't be C, which is whole-disk-excluding-special-bits, nor D, which
is whole-disk-including-special-bits. B is for swap. So .. E it is.

if you look in system logs you will probably see the system saying "no disklabel detected, faking one" in
some way.

btw, this whole disklabel thing is very confused. we have disk labels, partitions, slices, wedges, and now
with GPT we have GPT label-thingys. I think somebody wants to write a brief intro to the various ways you
can talk about media, and dice it up..

-ggm