Hi, I'd like to suggest a possible enhancement to mount and fstab entries to support mounting a path dependent on the usb drive that is attached.
I read a thread somewhat related (http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2011-07/msg00367.html) which was rejected, however I think that this is a different idea. I'm particularly interested in fstab entries for automatic mounts rather than user specified mounting via the commandline. In particular I would like to remove the knowledge of the drive letter that is forced into the fstab currently. As you know, the drive letters can change and make your fstab entries incorrect. Or (in the case I'm looking at) mount the wrong drive with potentially destructive implications. fstab entry (current): ---------------- F:/mymount /mnt/mymntpoint vfat binary,user If I have lots of USB drives that I plug in at various times, this letter can change. What doesn't change is the ID for the drive. fstab entry (proposed): ---------------- /mymount UUID= cfa8-97e8-0008-fef7-0100-0000 /mnt/mymntpoint vfat binary,user The idea is to use the UUID to determine the drive letter rather than hardcode it into the fstab. I couldn't find a way to map the UUID returned by blkid to a drive letter. What I did find was that Windows has its own idea (not sure if it maps to UUID or not) of unique drive. The information is contained in the directory (registry): "/proc/registry/HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/MountedDevices/" Each mounted drive exists in this directory in for form of: <prefix><drive letter><suffix> where: <prefix> = "%5CDosDevices%5C" <suffix> = "%3A" So, the C: drive would be: "%5CDosDevices%5CC%3A" More information on this can be found here: http://diddy.boot-land.net/firadisk/files/mounteddevices.htm Also, from: http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html bash$ od -t x1 MountedDevices/%5CDosDevices%5CC%3A 0000000 cf a8 97 e8 00 08 fe f7 01 00 00 00 So, from the fstab above we could deduce that we were looking for drive C: and the mount could be altered (at mount time) to reflect this and mount the right location. My thoughts are that this is not trying to change the mount system that cygwin has in place, just provide an extension to remove the dependency on specific drive letters by dynamically retrieving these based on the drive identifier. NOTE: I'm not sure what (if any) relationship there is between the above registry entry and the uuid returned by blkid. What I am hoping is that this information could be utilised to remove drive letter dependency in mounts... What are the thoughts of the experts? Cheers, Mark. -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
