external USB hard drive—mounting, messing up boot

[Wade Preston Shearer]

I have some questions about an external HD connected to a server (HP  
ProLiant running FC3). First, I need to learn a little more about  
mounting things and second, I need to figure out why it is messing up  
the boot process.

When I plug the HD into the server, a directory named the same as the  
name that I gave the HD when I formatted it appears in /media/. After  
seeing that several months ago, I assumed that the OS has mounted it  
up automatically and that I was ready to do. So, I set a cron job to  
automatically back up to that each night. Well, sadly, I just  
discovered that the HD has not been mounted this entire time.  
Apparently, it created that directory but never mounted the external  
drive. This evening, I typed "mount <drive name>" and it said that it  
mounted it. I am fairly confident that it is mounted now. Is this the  
proper method? Do you also have to mount manually? Should FC3 mount  
automatically? Will it remount it on a reboot?

Now, the big issue. When the system tries to boot, it hangs if this  
external drive is attached because it tries to boot from it. I  
checked in bios and didn't see anything about external drives in the  
boot order. I think that it might be considering it a floppy drive,  
which seems strange since it's connected via USB. Anyone have any  
idea how I can tell the computer to ignore it in regards to anything  
boot related?


Wade Preston Shearer


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