gregoa's blog

mounting mp3 players & co

a short description on how I mount my mp3 player (a.k.a. an usb mass storage device):

• udev was already installed, it creates /dev/sda & /dev/sda1 when I plug in the player. manual mounting did already work at that point.
• I installed usbmount & changed /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf a bit. here are the relevant lines:

  FILESYSTEMS="ext2 ext3 vfat"
  FS_MOUNTOPTIONS="-fstype=vfat,umask=0,async"
  

• from now on the player was mounted on /media/usb0 by usbmount (which also creates a symlink /var/run/usbmount/$FOO to /media/usbX; another symlink /media/usb->/media/usb0 already existed).

caveats

• usbmount takes the first free mountpoint in /media/usbX so the device might end up somewhere else than /media/usb0.
• quoting from /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf:

  #############################################################################
  # WARNING!  The vfat filesystem does not yet fully implement sync-mounting. #
  # If you include "vfat" in the list of filesystem types, you *MUST* make    #
  # sure all data is written to the medium before you remove it (e.g. run the #
  # "sync" command in a terminal window).  Otherwise, you *WILL* lose data!   #
  #############################################################################
  

• umask=0 is not really beautiful but on a single user machine ...
• udev requires a kernel not older than 2.6.12 (at least the versions in testing & unstable).

gregoa, 2005-10-14, 2007-02-28