Partitions do not always mount

[terry_g]

I am running Fedora 12 i686. I have three hard drives in my computer with multiple partitions. Three of these partitions are mounted in /mnt by fstab. sdc10, sdb11, sdc1. all are EXT3.
About four of every five startups they are mounted. One drive is ATA the other two are SATA and when they are not mounted the drive order is changed the ATA drive which should be sdc is reported by gparted as sda and the SATA drives sda and sdb.

Any idea how to remedy this problem?

Thanks Terry

Here is my fstab:

#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Sat Nov 21 10:57:50 2009
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
UUID=2f93d3a5-0cef-4822-b39a-d7197acd7280 / ext3 defaults 1 1
UUID=576e66a3-13c7-427a-b23a-04e8f3b6c2fd /home ext3 defaults 1 2
#UUID=ff0ff244-feaf-4746-9dcc-d1f92771d7c5 swap swap defaults 0 0
UUID=70eaf543-f2bf-418c-94d3-05fc2494b212 swap swap defaults 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb11 /mnt/sdb11 ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sda10 /mnt/sda10 ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sda8 /mnt/sda8 ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sda9 /mnt/sda9 ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb9 /mnt/sdb9 ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb10 /mnt/sdb10 ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdc1 ext3 defaults 0 0

[stoat]

Hello terry_g,

I don't really know the answer. Sorry. But my guess is that it's because drive enumeration is not as predictable as it used to be. If this were happening to me, I think I would try using UUIDs or partition labels in the fstab for all those partitions to be mounted in /mnt.

[terry_g]

Stoat Thanks your suggestion has helped two of the three partitions mount using UUID in fstab. For some reason some of the partitions on the second SATA drive do not have a UUID according to gparted and I also issued the command in the terminal: $ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid and some of the partitions are not listed.

Terry

[stoat]

If blkid has no UUID or LABEL for some partitions, then you can teach yourself how to generate and assign UUIDs to them. For ext3 partitions like yours, see the man pages for uuidgen and tune2fs. I've never done that, but it's not hard to find plenty about it with Google, and it seems straightforward.

Or, you can assign partition labels to them and use LABEL in the fstab. For ext3 partitions, see tune2fs or e2label. Now that, I have done. I prefer labels for auxiliary partitions, and I mount them to similarly named mount points. It helps me keep track of what's on them.