Re: [tlug] run on startup, but not too early

[Jim <jep200404@example.com>]

Charles Muller wrote:

> I like to have my fat32 drives, ... 

Well, you probably mean fat32 _partitions_, not fat32 _drives_. 
A drive is the whole physical hard drive. 
For MS OSs (and most Linux uses), the beginning of a hard drive 
has a partition table and then partitions. 
A partition is one part of the storage on that drive. 
MS terminology likes to confuse partitions as drives. 

> ... which are registered as /mnt/win_d and 
> /mnt/usbdrv, automatically mounted on startup. But if I register them as 
> "auto" in FSTAB, the usually end up being mistakenly mounted as 
> non-writable, no matter what other commands I include, and nothing I do 
> manually can change this once the system is running.

You are probably doing something wrong, and that's likely why the 
OS is (probably rightly so) refusing to let you write to the partitions. 

Show us: 

1. Your /etc/fstab file. 

2. The commands you use to unmount and remount the fat32 partitions. 

3. The output of the bare "mount" command, 
   after you've tried to mount the partitions (not drives). 

4. The output of fdisk -l for the corresponding drive. 
   (E.g., if /mnt/win_d is from /dev/hda1, 
   show the output of "fdisk -l /dev/hda".)

> Is there possibly a file or directory where I can put these mount 
> commands in a way that they are one of the latter, or last events in the 
> bootup process?

Yes, but since you mentioned that: 

> ... nothing I do manually can change this once the system is running.

automating the commands that don't work for you manually won't help. 
It will just automate your failure. 

First, figure out the correct commands to mount and unmount the 
partitions. Second, figure out how to automate it. /etc/fstab is 
the right destination for automated mounting. init.d/rc.d scripts 
are a poor place for automation of mounting.