I plug in my Seagate FreeAgent external hard drive and then plug the USB into my Ubuntu 10.04 machine and, as expected, it mounts in /media
. OK, this is great. I can access the files, etc. Then, I edit my smb.conf
file for this drive, so that I can share it and I add a line for sharing drives I don't own.
I share the drive and unmount it and then remount with
sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /media/FreeAgent
and it mounts fine. I can access the drive from a Windows XP machine on my network. Then, a short while later, it auto-mounts again, as /media/Main-BackUp
and then the mount point /media/FreeAgent
no longer has the drive mounted and the files are not present. The files are in the newly mounted directory. I should note that the name of the drive is Main-BackUp. I have edited my smb.conf
file several ways to get this to work, including changing the name so it matches and the mount point directory where it should live. It is currently like so:
[Main-BackUp]
comment = Backup drive
path = /media/Main-BackUp
guest ok = yes
browseable = yes
read only = no
create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777
But I have changed the line path = /media/Main-BackUp
to path = /media/FreeAgent
with no success.
Then, some time later, it does this again, and another mount point is created /media/Main-BackUp_
and then the previous mount doesn't have any files but this new one does. Each time, a window pops up with the new mount and the files on my external drive. If I leave this machine alone for an hour or so, it will repeat this process 5 or 6 times.
I successfully mounted a Drobo on my work network using a similar technique and it works great. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. Any help is greatly appreciated.
NOTE - So I commented out the lines in the smb.conf
and experimented with the drive auto-mounting on it's own. Still happens. I searched for a way to run off auto-mounting, but in 10.04 I can't find it. I tried Preferences > File Management > Media and unchecked anything that seemed likely to cause this to no avail. Towards the end of the auto-mounting experiment after commenting out the lines in smb.conf
an error was generated.
NOTE 2 - The drive mounts OK, but then several minutes later, the network share becomes blank and the files aren't there. I go to the server computer and look at the drive, and this most recent time, the drive shifted from sdb1 to sdc1. I remounted and it seemed to work again but then after a few minutes, the same behavior comes back... Empty share. This is odd behavior and I'm not sure I'm getting the root cause.