Un/Mounting firewire drive.

[michaelsanford]

I know this is pretty basic stuff, but I'm not very knowledgeable about grafting devices into the filesystem tree once the system has booted.

I have a LaCie firewire drive connected directly to my iMac TFT (LaCie 1394 Disk drive LUN 0) in Apple System Profiler.

What do I have to issue at the terminal to mount and to unmount this drive, assuming that it is always powered on.

The reason: Perhaps LaCie in general, but this drive specifically, is notoriously finikity, and has a tendancy to freeze the system, and then worse, the entire filesystem of the FW drive gets corrupted (necessitating a reformat). I like to back up my files onto my FW drive (over ssh when I'm away) and then unmount the drive to make sure it won't get corrupted in case of a power failure, etc.

[gwailo:~]% mount
/dev/disk0s5 on / (local)
devfs on /dev (local)
fdesc on /dev (union)
<volfs> on /.vol (read-only)
automount -fstab [244] on /Network/Servers (automounted)
automount -static [244] on /automount (automounted)
automount -fstab [298] on /Network/Servers (automounted)
automount -static [298] on /automount (automounted)

 

[anarchie]

Well, the quickest way to unmount a FW drive is to disconnect it from the computer. Aside from that, you can use disktool -l to find out the disk which represents it, then disktool -e to eject that disk. You would want to unmount the disk itself(disk1, disk2, etc) and not one of its partitions(disk1s1, disk1s1s2, etc).

Once it has been unmounted, you can use disktool -m to mount it again.

BTW: If you know the drive is finicky and tends to become corrupted, why are you backing things up onto it in the first place?

 

[michaelsanford]

Well, two reasons:

1. Backing up 35 GB of data onto CD is impractical and expensive and complicated.

2. I'm a student, therefore I'm poor and can't afford a better drive (this one was $500 CDN back when it was the biggest available at MicroServ).

My drive's 60 GB by the way...

Thanks anarchie!