On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 14:19 -0800, Kenneth Porter wrote: > --On Thursday, February 04, 2010 8:36 AM -0600 Robert Nichols > <rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net> wrote: > > > Looks like that's about all you can do. USB devices aren't available > > until hotplug discovers them, and that's proceeding in parallel with the > > rest of the boot sequence. Be sure to put a timeout in that loop lest it > > hang forever if that external device is absent. > > Even better would be to make the script event-driven and launched by the > hotplug process. Then there's no busy-wait. > > This page has some info: > > <http://linux.die.net/man/8/hotplug> > > The detail links on this page aren't working for me but look promising: > > <http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net/> > Since the OP is looking to have their USB drive mounted before mythtv's backend process starts up, I'd recommend disabling the mythbackend startup script: chkconfig mythbackend off Then doing a manual mount in /etc/rc.local, followed by starting mythbackend. /sbin/mount /dev/sdb1 /wherever /sbin/service mythbackend start Of course, I wouldn't recommend using a USB drive for storing myth recordings, as it eventually bite you due to USB2's limited bandwidth... -I (also a mythtv user!)