NTFS Partitions mount (or don't) on startup

[jbjonas]

Has anybody else experienced this problem? I haven't seen any mention of it in the forums... Maybe I'm not searching well enough.

I have a dual boot system (with XP) set up with little problems. My XP install has 3 NTFS partitions, but OSX will mount them in different orders after each reboot. Sometimes, one or two of them won't show up at all, and when I mount them manually (mount_ntfs etc.) they show up as ejectable mounts... I found a utility called Desktility that will rearrange them into proper order on login (on the desktop I mean, and only if they are all there), so I can deal with that part, but a lot of the time one of the NTFS drives just won't show up. The only way I have to make it appear properly is to restart until it does. Relaunching the finder doesn't work (except to put them out of order again ) and logging out and back in doesn't help either. The only thing that I have noticed, when going to mount it manually, is that after each reboot OSX seems to assign each drive in a different order. Sometimes in /dev/ I'll get:

 disk0   disk0s1   disk0s5   disk1   disk1s1   disk2   disk2s1

or sometimes I'll get other variations like:

disk0   disk0s1   disk1   disk1s1   disk1s5   disk2   disk2s1

Can anyone make sense out of this?

I would expect OSX to assign the drives as devices in some order based on how they show up on my SATA and ATA bus. I don't get it. If anyone has had this issue, or has any ideas (can I manually define my drives in OSX somehow?) I would really appreciate the help. This constant restarting is driving me mad!

 

Oh- I should say that of course the partitions all show up (and in different orders) in Disk Utility.

Also I had this same problem with 10.4.1 before I reinstalled with 10.4.3

Thanks.

 

Edit: I've done some searching on here, and seem similar complaints about automounting drives, but I haven't seen anyone with the same problem of OSX assigning different device names at each boot, otherwise I would define the mounts manually... Help!

[Metrogirl]

Has anybody else experienced this problem? ...

 

 

My dual boot system only has one XP and one OSX partition, so I haven't seen this ... but I see that my G5 which has multiple disks assigns /dev/whatever to the disks in any sort of seemingly random order when it boots. Since they show on the desktop with their labels, it's no big deal but if I wanted to write code that accessed the raw devices by device name it would be a pain.

 

You could try adding a sleep xx delay to the rc before it gets around to mounting the filesystems because it might be that some drives are ready before others so they get allocated a label first? Or add lines that mount a device, sleep, mount, sleep, in the order you want. That might work, don't know. It wouldn't help the vanishing devices though. Or maybe it would if you explicitly mount them in rc.

 

I have long grown weary of multi-disk Windows systems suddenly reallocating drive letters without warning and stuffing things up. Not very often, but often enough to be a pain, particularly when you plug in a USB device.

[jbjonas]

At least in windows you can go into Disk Management and change the letters manually if that happens.

On my previous install, I edited the rc to remove all the mounts and then reassign them, but I had two problems. 1. One of the drives is the OSX partition, so I don't want to (or can't?) unmount it. 2. I can't even make a script, because of my 3 NTFS drives, 2 are partitions on the same physical disk, and since they get assigned willy nilly I never know which disk has the diskXs5 on it. Arrrrrrgh! maybe I need to figure out some logical pattern of command that will fix the situation in rc in all of the possible permutations of device assignments.....

[Metrogirl]

I just realised that my comment 'mount - sleep - mount - sleep' could be taken quite out of context! You know what I meant...

[jbjonas]

(man I was dying to use that new smily)

*Bumpity-Bump*

[Munkeymon]

Does OSX have some analouge to the /etc/fstab file found on most *nix-based systems that you could edit to prevent it from automounting the partitions on boot? That's what I would do.

 

I would test it, but I'm still figuring out the best way to install it in the first place (damned SSE3 instruction set).

[jbjonas]

Does OSX have some analouge to the /etc/fstab

 

Yes, it does have /etc/ftsab.hd, but its contents are:

IGNORE THIS FILE.
This file does nothing, contains no useful data, and might go away in
future releases.  Do not depend on this file or its contents.

I don't know alot about this, ad I never messed with fstab in my linux or freeBSD installs... Someone out there please help??? What does OSX (or Darwin) use instead of fstab.hd?

[R. Bear Helms]

Beats me... Then again I have what shouldn't be problems but are. USB devices plugged in at boot seem to freeze the USB system, and no functionality for my ICH6 sound.

 

Apple wins - I'll buy an iMac Core Duo when and if I can afford one. I like the OS enough to try and get it working better, and as I learn things from personal experience, I'm trying to add all I learn into the Wiki either in Technical FAQ or new sections as appropriate.

[jbjonas]

Hmmm, thanks for your analysis R. Bear Helms I suppose I should just be grateful that this is the worst of my problems I'm still open to anyone else's interpretation or suggestions, though...