On 26/02/2013 08:16 AM, scott wrote:
> Yes, I use the \\?\{<drive_guid>} syntax to make sure my backups always
> get written to the correct drive (with several hard drives and USB
> storage devices connected I am never sure if the drive letters will be
> repeatable).

The GUID is so huge that I'd never use that. (And if you ever reformat 
the drive, I believe it'll change.) But *much* more reliable than using 
the disk number, drive letter or similar.

> I only have one annoyance left with my linux setup, I have the external
> USB drive connected most of the time to it and it always appears as
> /media/EXTERNAL (EXTERNAL is the drive name). However, if I boot it up
> *without* the drive connected once, it will never appear again unless I
> manually create the folder /media/EXTERNAL and reboot. I don't know
> enough about what goes on behind the scenes to prevent this happening.

When the system starts up, it reads /etc/fstab and mounts everything 
listed there (except entries marked as "noauto"). But it only does this 
on startup. You can probably do "mount /media/EXTERNAL" to make it to 
mount it any time you want...

...alternatively, some fluffy end-user helpy-helper tool is doing this, 
in which case all bets are off.

This is the greatest problem with Linux. It's based on Unix, which works 
in a defined way, but it's rather unfriendly. So now a mish-mash of 
incompatible tools sit on top of it trying to make it user-friendly. And 
it works great, most of the time. But when it breaks, suddenly you have 
to know all this arcane crap again to figure out what's up.

(Oh, and your helpy-helper tool will NOT have any documentation...)

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