The system needs to know which disk and partition is / and mount it when it starts up. I am thinking that before the files on the hard drive are loaded, the system has already decided on which disk will be /dev/sda1 (the USB memory stick) and mounts that regardless of what is determined in the fstab?

However, if I try to boot with the USB memory stick plugged in, it will not boot. If I run mount –a (when the system is up and running), all appears to be OK. LABEL=myusb /media/usb vfat defaults, 0 0 (this is my USB memory stick) LABEL=myrootfs / ext4 defaults, noatime 0 1 (this is my USB hard drive – connected via a powered hub) I have tried your suggestion of using LABEL= … but with no luck. My second drive, has no entries in fstab but still mounts on boot.īy label I mean use something like 'gparted' to give the physical drives/partitions names/labels. Every thing auto mounts, I don't need to run the mount command. I can have my hard drive and USB stick in any hub ports and the systemīoots ok. dev/sda2 is my main system drive/partition. dev/sda6 /media/extra ntfs-3g rw,default,user 0 / $ As you can see all of my drives/partitions have labels/names and mount folders. dev/sda5 /media/data ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 dev/sda3 /media/wheezy_s ext4 rw,sync,nodev,noexec,noatime,nodiratime,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 dev/sda2 /media/wheezy_h ext4 rw,nodev,noexec,noatime,nodiratime,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0

# a swapfile is not a swap partition, so no using swapon|off from here on, use dphys-swapfile swap for that dev/mmcblk0p2 / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1 I am guessing that the UUID is only worked out after the disk has been mounted? I have tried changing this parameter to boot=/dev/disk/by-uuid/… and also boot=UUID=…… but neither works. The only way I can boot the system (without the second USB drive) is when I use boot=/dev/sda1 My guess is that with the second USB drive plugged in, that drive is being recognised as /dev/sda1 (and the hard drive as /dev/sdb1) and hence it does not boot. I suspect that this is to do with the parameters in my cmdline.txt in the boot partition. Running mount –a seems to work OK when up and running, but I still cannot boot when both are plugged in. I cannot seem to boot the pi with this plugged in at the same time as the hard drive.Ĭhanging fstab to reference UUID for both drives. However, I want to use a secondary USB memory stick (for backup purposes). I have bought an external USB HDD and I have successfully moved my root partition to the external drive, and I now only use the SD card for booting to the hard drive.

Labels for usb drives