Unreliable automount

[fishyeah]

Hi there

 

I've been using os x on my PC for a while. I found that the Automount feature is not quite reliable.

 

Configuration: I've got three drives (2 SATA, 1 IDE) triple booting Ubuntu, WinXP and OS X using GRUB: Ubuntu on 1st SATA drive, WinXP and OS X on 2nd SATA drive. I would like OS X automount three other partitions: 2 FAT32 (for sharing among three OSes, one on 1st SATA and the other on IDE) and 1 NTFS (backup partition created under WinXP, on 2nd SATA drive).

 

Problem: sometimes only one FAT32 partition is automounted, one or two restarts you will see both FAT32 partitions. I tried the /etc/fstab approach with the same result (although you can always use it to stop a partition from automount). The NTFS partition is always automounted. However, under terminal, some directories are shown containing 0 file/directory. Although if such directories were accessed once (either via cd command within terminal or Finder), everything becomes normal. You wouldn't notice the problem with Finder, but if you share such directories using say SharePoints, a remote PC sees such directories as 0-sized file and cannot access - this can be simply solved by traverse the affected directories with Finder or Terminal.

 

Anybody experience the same problems? I consider a shell script may be the best solution to the problem: use a script to mount the FAT32 partitions if they are not already mounted, and use another script to traverse the NTFS partition.

 

Any other suggestions?

 

Thanks!

[NeSuKuN]

when a partition is incorrectly unmounted by an OS, the automount fails. are you sure your windows or linux is unmounting right?

[fishyeah]

when a partition is incorrectly unmounted by an OS, the automount fails. are you sure your windows or linux is unmounting right?

 

I did notice that the problem of one FAT32 partition not automounting usually occurred when I just returned from Windows or Linux. Once this occurred, I restart OS X, then the missing FAT32 automount alright. If it were unmounted incorrectly, why restart OS X solves the problem? Also manual mount works fine. Another point - how would one ensure Windows/Linux to unmount a partition correctly?

 

This does not explain my NTFS partition automount problem - it is consistently automounted, although directories reporting 0 file/directory may be different with different restart.

 

Thanks for your reply!