How do I automount an ext2 USB Disk?

[mickle026]

I have recently bought a Toshiba 1TB external USB disk.

I have formatted it using gparted to ext2 and Debian see's it but gives me an error "unable to mount volume" with some extra stuff about programs shouldn't disconnect shared drives.

I can mount it ok by creating a folder called usbdisk and the mount command "mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /home/mike/usbdisk" and it works fine, but I have to do this everytime I start the machine.

Does anyone know what exactly I should put into a setup file to make the machine do this everytime , but only if its there.

As I'm not very clued up on bash scripting , I'm assuming it something along these lines:

if [ -e /dev/sda1 ] ; then
mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /home/mike/usbdisk
fi

How would I add this at boot?? Would I add it to the end of "init.d/rc" ?


Thanks for any help, and if there is an alternative way please post it.

If editing fstab is suggested, Can editing fstab option take into account its removable?

[mickle026]

I have converted the disk to ext3 format with "tune2fs -j /dev/sda1" , which adds a journal for crash recovery.

I have also added the line "/dev/sda1 /home/mike/usbdisk auto rw,noauto,user,sync 0 0" to fstab.

This seems to work. I had thought that it would need adding to "init.d/rc" but it seems good in fstab.