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Ryan Hodges1 Author

Level 1

0 points

Leopard and /etc/fstab

In 10.4 I was able to mount my /Users directory from a separate disk partition by inserting a line like the following in /etc/fstab:

LABEL=Users /Users hfs rw 1 2

This works under Leopard. The problem is that my bootup times increased dramatically. After examining the console log and system log I was seeing errors from automount that say something like:

Can't stat LABEL=Users: No such file or directory

fsck_hfs was also printing scaring messages regarding this partition. I don't have the exact errors on hand. Since this is a work machine and I needed to be up and running quickly, I just reverted back to a single partition setup.

Things would work fine but I think these messages are related to how long it was taking to boot the machine.

Cheers,
Ryan

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Nov 1, 2007 12:19 PM

17 replies

May 30, 2008 5:09 AM in response to xld00d

I tried this on my 10.5.3 Server. The effect was that the /usr/local disk was not mounted.

diskutil info /usr/local
Device Identifier: disk0s3
Device Node: /dev/disk0s3
Part Of Whole: disk0
Device / Media Name: Untitled

Volume Name: RNAServerUsrLocal
Mount Point: /usr/local
File System: Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+
Journal size 8192 KB at offset 0xf3000
Owners: Enabled

Partition Type: Apple_HFS
Bootable: Is bootable
Media Type: Generic
Protocol: SATA
SMART Status: Verified
Volume UUID: E2D6932F-0129-3F58-AA54-D108CF1DBB97

Total Size: 30.1 Gi (32284766208 B) (63056184 512-byte blocks)
Free Space: 17.3 Gi (18528956416 B) (36189368 512-byte blocks)

Read Only: No
Ejectable: No
Whole: No
Internal: Yes

/etc/fstab:

UUID=E2D6932F-0129-3F58-AA54-D108CF1DBB97 /usr/local hfs+ rw 1 0

Maybe relevant from syslog:

May 30 13:18:56 localhost com.apple.launchctl.System[2]: mount: exec /usr/sbin/mount_hfs+ for /usr/local: No such file or directory
May 30 13:19:17 vanroodewierda com.apple.autofsd[86]: automount: Mount for UUID=E2D6932F-0129-3F58-AA54-D108CF1DBB97 has no host name

But when I changed hfs+ to hfs it worked:

UUID=E2D6932F-0129-3F58-AA54-D108CF1DBB97 /usr/local hfs rw 1 0

xld00d

Level 1

0 points

May 31, 2008 4:19 AM in response to Gerben Wierda

Thanks for the tip. I figured it out with your feedback. I put a hint on my beta pages: beta.jamesstroud.com/jamess-miscellaneous-how-tos/os-x-admin/os-x-firewire-moun t-point

I also posted a hint on macosxhints.com under the title "OS X Firewire Mount Point". In short, this wasn't working for me because the firewire drive took a while to come up before it could be seen by the system. The equivalent of this:

UUID=A740D396-D42D-3348-BD87-709342F87840 /my/mount/point hfs rw 1 0

Worked for me if I waited a while and mounted manually with "diskutil mountDisk". But I needed to do the equivalent of this to get the drive to mount automatically:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool true

I summarize all of this on the link above on the hint I submitted (which may take a while to hit the macosxhints website.

Thanks again! Problem solved.

Leopard and /etc/fstab