I have a G5 tower with the mere 2 USB ports in back, so one of my external hard drives is connected over USB2 through a USB2 hub.
It works great, the only issue is that if I restart the system, it does not get mounted on the desktop automatically. If I turn the drive off and then back on, it will mount automagically and be fine. I assume that the problem is that the hub delays the system from seeing that there is a hard drive there during its probe, until it is too late to be automatically dealt with, since it will mount on reboots fine if plugged in without the hub.
Since Apple hasn't seen fit to put in an adult number of USB ports, I'm stuck with the hub and would like to find a script or tool to force the system to "check again" for external drives once it is done booting, but have no idea where to start. I can't see evidence of the drive at all in the /dev/ tree, and it certainly isn't in the /mnt/ or /Volumes/ trees, so trying to umount and then mount in a script won't work. The whole boot process is sufficiently different from Linux that I'm not entirely sure where to be looking.
thanks!
Nathaniel
trevor
12-26-2005, 08:05 PM
You have a PowerMac G5, which means you can put in any number of USB ports that you like without resorting to a hub. Just buy a USB 2.0 card and plug it in. (This is assuming you have a PCI G5. If you have a PCI-express G5, you may need to wait for someone to release a PCI-express USB 2.0 card.)
Trevor
nmerriam
12-26-2005, 10:13 PM
D'oh! Than, such an obvious answer in many ways, I really should get a PCI card with some extra USB/Firewire connections. It's an AGP/PCI(X) system so that won't be a problem. Sometimes we spend so long looking at a problem we imagine the solution must be terribly complex.
I am still curious, there must be a process of some sort that can be rerun manually to detect removable storage devices. Coming from both Linux and BSD systems I find the Mac to be a brilliant design in many ways but mysterious when I find areas like this that don't seem to be discoverable. Now that i think about it, i'm sure it's documented somewhere in Darwin, i just wouldn't have the faintest idea how to find it.
TOP
