Mount USB drives on boot

On Fedora Core 7, leaving a USB drive (a simple flash disk) connected doesn't seem to be mounting after reboot even though it's properly listed in the /etc/fstab. I went through a few solutions to this, like this one, but the only one that worked for me was modifying the /etc/rc.sysinit script as I explain below.

I seem to remember creating an entry in the fstab, and allowing the auto option (which is part of the default specification), would make your USB partition mount on boot. The issue with FC7 seems to be that the usb-storage kernel module isn't being loaded when the fstab is first loaded, and that the USB devices aren't initialized yet by /etc/rc.sysinit. This seems to be common with all newer distros, in accordance with the move to udev, hal and other components, which facilitate plug & play user mounting and they don't need them to be available before entering a GUI. This is great for workstations, but I have a "headless" server configuration, therefor I'm not using GNOME to mount anything on-demand, but rather they should be available statically.

After a few days of trial & error, and inspiration from this post, I added the following lines to the end of my /etc/rc.sysinit. Note that changes to this particular file may be removed by system updates (Using yum) as I explain below.

# Try to mount all USB partitions
# This should be moved to `rc.local' and be prepended with a wait
modprobe usb-storage
mount -a

I believe this is the most most robust method, since simply adding the entry to the fstab will allow it to be mounted after the USB devices are initialized. It is preferred to use the /etc/rc.local script to issue this nature of commands (local/custom configuration), but this script seems to be run before the /etc/rc.sysinit script exits, meaning the USB partitions may not yet be available. Commanding the /etc/rc.local script to wait for the /etc/rc.sysinit script to exit may be a solution.

Finally, note that you can guarantee consistency of the partition before mounting it by carefully editing the corresponding fstab line in the normal way, see man 5 fstab for more.