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From: Douglas Alan on 3 Jul 2008 15:18
Does anyone know if there is a way of mounting an external drive under
OS X so that it is considered non-removable by OS X? (One way to
accomplish this is to boot off of the external drive, which is what
I'm doing right now, but it seems as if there should be a better way.)

I.e., if for some reason an internal disk drive (or the boot disk)
hiccups, the OS patiently waits for it to get better. (This is
traditionally the way that Unix has behaved about disks.) An application
never receives an error of any kind, nor does it see an empty
filesystem. It just sees a time delay, while the disk drive is
pondering the meaning of life. The application is forced by the OS to
wait patiently until the drive is behaving itself again.

With external drives (or at least external USB drives), a drive will
often pause for a little bit, and in the meantime, the OS returns
errors (or perhaps presents an empty filesystem) to the application.
This makes some applications (like iTunes, for instance) completely
spaz, and the only fix is to logout and log back in. Sometimes, the
database even gets corrupted.

I don't want the programs the I use to spaz. I want them to just
recovery gracefully, as in the days of yore.

Thanks for any suggestions,
|>oug
From: Gregory Weston on 3 Jul 2008 16:17
In article <lc7ic2rd2y.fsf(a)gaffa.mit.edu>,
Douglas Alan <doug(a)alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> Does anyone know if there is a way of mounting an external drive under
> OS X so that it is considered non-removable by OS X? (One way to
> accomplish this is to boot off of the external drive, which is what
> I'm doing right now, but it seems as if there should be a better way.)
>
> I.e., if for some reason an internal disk drive (or the boot disk)
> hiccups, the OS patiently waits for it to get better. (This is
> traditionally the way that Unix has behaved about disks.) An application
> never receives an error of any kind, nor does it see an empty
> filesystem. It just sees a time delay, while the disk drive is
> pondering the meaning of life. The application is forced by the OS to
> wait patiently until the drive is behaving itself again.
>
> With external drives (or at least external USB drives), a drive will
> often pause for a little bit, and in the meantime, the OS returns
> errors (or perhaps presents an empty filesystem) to the application.
> This makes some applications (like iTunes, for instance) completely
> spaz, and the only fix is to logout and log back in. Sometimes, the
> database even gets corrupted.
>
> I don't want the programs the I use to spaz. I want them to just
> recovery gracefully, as in the days of yore.

I have not seen the behavior you're describing, in years of using
external FireWire, SCSI and USB storage devices. Or, to be more
specific: What I have seen, consistently, is the behavior you want. I
haven't seen errors or blank file systems; just delays. I believe that
the problem is local, and I don't think the OS's conception of the drive
as "external" or "internal" really has anything to do with it. I might
suspect there's something wrong with the controllers in the external
drive(s) you're using.

--
"Harry?" Ron's voice was a mere whisper. "Do you smell something ... burning?"
- Harry Potter and the Odor of the Phoenix
From: zit on 4 Jul 2008 06:32
On Jul 4, 3:18 am, Douglas Alan <d...(a)alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> Does anyone know if there is a way of mounting an external drive under
> OS X so that it is considered non-removable by OS X?  

Back in the day, one used "mount".
I haven't used it since automounting became more convenient.
iTunes does really freak out when it looses an automounted drive.
I just do rm this and mv that in /Volumes, and reboot.
I should try hard mounting the iTunes drive to see if iTunes would
behave better.

I recall an external boot drive getting unplugged in the past.
This was not pretty. You suggest that plugging it back in would have
fixed it??
I would not boot a laptop from an external drive on a regular basis.
From: Simon Slavin on 5 Jul 2008 15:36
On 03/07/2008, Douglas Alan wrote in message
<lc7ic2rd2y.fsf(a)gaffa.mit.edu>:

> Does anyone know if there is a way of mounting an external drive under
> OS X so that it is considered non-removable by OS X?

If there were such a thing it would probably be an option for the 'mount'
command. There's no such option. The removability status is normally set
by the driver for the device involved: it knows what kind of device it's
driving and therefore whether it's removable.

> I.e., if for some reason an internal disk drive (or the boot disk)
> hiccups, the OS patiently waits for it to get better.

I'm not familiar with the connection between the two things. And I don't
think you're right. The driver for a device is more likely to be the
thing that decides whether the device is going to come back soon or not.

Simon.
--
http://www.hearsay.demon.co.uk
From: Tom Stiller on 5 Jul 2008 18:32
In article <g4os3h$h55$2$8300dec7(a)news.demon.co.uk>,
Simon Slavin <slavins.delete.these.four.words(a)hearsay.demon.co.uk>
wrote:

> On 03/07/2008, Douglas Alan wrote in message
> <lc7ic2rd2y.fsf(a)gaffa.mit.edu>:
>
> > Does anyone know if there is a way of mounting an external drive under
> > OS X so that it is considered non-removable by OS X?
>
> If there were such a thing it would probably be an option for the 'mount'
> command. There's no such option. The removability status is normally set
> by the driver for the device involved: it knows what kind of device it's
> driving and therefore whether it's removable.

The hdiutil "attach" verb takes a "-notremovable" option when invoked as
root.

[snip]

--
Tom Stiller

PGP fingerprint = 5108 DDB2 9761 EDE5 E7E3 7BDA 71ED 6496 99C0 C7CF
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