Sheevaplug – automount USB drive at boot

The problem with the Sheevaplug is that it boots too damn fast and the USB drive is too slow to be available for the fstab mount.

The solution, see here for my post on setting up the fstab file to mount your USB drive. When you edit the fstab on the Sheeva you will find it empty but you should end up with an entry similar to this.

# UNCONFIGURED FSTAB FOR BASE SYSTEM
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive ext3 auto,user,rw,exec 0 0

My usb drive is mounted at /dev/sda1 and I created a mount point called /mnt/usbdrive, the drive is formatted as ext3 but you can replace this with the format of your drive or just replace with the word auto for it to check.

Once you have your fstab in place you need to create a script which will slow down the boot for the USB drive to start. Thanks to restamp on the plugcomputer.org forum see here for the solution.
First navigate to the init.d folder, in a [Terminal] issue the command;

cd /etc/init.d

then using whatever text editor you have installed [I added nano], open a file called wait4usbdrive with;

nano wait4usbdrive

then copy into it restarts script;

#!/bin/sh
#
# If /etc/fstab has been configured to mount a USB drive, pause to give
# the USB drive devices time to show up in /dev. If this is not done,
# checkfs.sh will fail, requiring manual intervention…
#
case "$1" in
start)
grep -q ^/dev/sda /etc/fstab &&
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
do
[ -b /dev/sda ] && exit 0
sleep 1
done
exit 1
;;
stop)
;;
esac

Then make it executable with;

chmod +x wait4usbdrive

Then link it to the rcS.d folder with this command;

ln -s ../init.d/wait4usbdrive /etc/rcS.d/S25wait4usbdrive

Now you can shutdown and restart the plug and the USB drive should now auto-mount. My USB drive is a 1.5 TB iomega with it’s own power supply.