adding an old external drive to fstab using uuid

[m_ad]

This is a very old drive, one of Seagates first. It has a vfat filesystem.

I want to add this device to /etc/fstab so that I (not sudo) have write access to it, and also because I often add/remove external drives to this desktop, so the location of the drive changes. However, when I do


ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

I get


total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-07-20 03:08 07D7-0402 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-07-20 12:00 1BF01501126BEDB9 -> ../../sdb1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-07-20 03:08 4ac7144d-c29e-4cc2-a93e-e72c74c89005 -> ../../sda7
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-07-20 03:08 5FDE77B2003BFE84 -> ../../sda3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-07-20 03:08 923CF8013CF7DDE3 -> ../../sda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-07-20 03:08 9493f3bc-b78f-4de9-a402-96c0091b3ca0 -> ../../sda5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-07-20 03:08 e87c9022-8820-4e7b-b1d8-1886d825ca48 -> ../../sda6

In other words, it doesn't show up. The device (right now) is /dev/sdc1, so when I do


sudo vol_id /dev/sdc1

I get


/dev/sdc1: unknown volume type

One last thing, when I do


sudo blkid

It shows up! I get


/dev/sdc1: LABEL="SEAGATE" UUID="0000-0F12" TYPE="vfat"

Now I have a UUID, right? Nope, when I add the device to /etc/fstab using the above UUID, and then try and mount it using


mount /media/Seagate

I get


mount: special device /dev/disk/by-uuid/0000-0F12 does not exist

What's up?

[yabbadabbadont]

Try mounting it using the LABEL instead of UUID in your /etc/fstab. The uuid listed for that drive looks suspiciously like some generic that is used when a volume has a fat12 filesystem on it... If it is a small drive, and hasn't been formatted in a long time, then it might be fat12 instead of fat32. In which case you might need to mount it as msdos and not vfat. I'm just guessing though, but it should give you some things to try out.

[m_ad]

Thanks for the response. I may have been wrong when I said it's really old. Its around 5 years old.

The problem is, when I do


ls -l /dev/disk/by-label

it doesn't show up.

In case it helps,


[matt@matt-desktop:~]$ sudo fdisk -l

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 48641 390708801 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

:lolflag: W95 FAT32 LBA? and BOOT?!