[CentOS] text-mode system and /media

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Tuesday, June 07, 2011 12:58 AM -0400 Robert Heller 
<heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:

> The problem is this: you also need some way to unmount the disk.  And
> for FAT file systems, you need to somehow map the ownership.  The GUI
> does the mount in the logged in user and the [GNome] desktop icon
> includes a right-click menu with an 'eject' / 'unmount' item.

In my case they're all magnetics with ext3 logical drives, so they show up 
with labels.

My practice has been to label them "Backup1", "Backup2", etc. and then 
"mount /dev/disk/by-label/Backup1 /mnt/Backup1". Or list all the 
possibilities in /etc/fstab so I can just name the mount point in the mount 
command.

An additional complication is that some USB drives spin down after some 
idle time, and don't spin back up when accessed, leading to errors and FS 
corruption. I've used "hdparam -s 0 --prefer-ata12 /dev/sdb" (for example) 
but some drives ignore that, so I end up needing to start a script that 
touches a file and sync's every few seconds.