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Using Mac OS X 10.4

I made a script a while ago for my linux box in order to take archived data off of 300 floppies that automated the process. I would make an image of the floppy and copy the files directly off of the floppy. I managed to install xcode on the machine (in order to install ddrescue)

The thing is on a linux box I mounted each floppy to /media/floppy and unmounted it to ddrescue it and copied it directly to a usb drive.

I'm trying to port my script to the mac, and it seems that it's default behavior is to automatically mount each zip floppy to the /Volumes folder, which is fine, except it uses the volume's name as it's mount point folder name. So if a floppy's volume name is, "Jimmy Bo Bobs" it will mount to /media/Jimmy /Bo /Bobs.

So my question is I need to get the volume name either consistent to one name, or adaptable to the volume's name.

So my initial question is can I some how mount a drive to a specific folder, Like I would normally do in linux?

 #Linux
 mount /dev/sd1 /media/floppy
 #Mac
 diskutil mount /dev/disk1s1 /media/floppy #Doesn't work

If it's not possible, is there an easy way to extract the volume's name so that I can then link the script like this. 

 Volumename=Jimmy Bo Bobs
 do stuff to /Volume/$Volumename

I'm guessing if it's not possible I'll have to grep the mount command to the /dev/ pointer and then somehow parse that string which is what I want to avoid since it would require even more research.

|improve this question
  • Have You checked [-mountPoint path] option for diskutil ? – Mateusz Szlosek Sep 30 '14 at 8:47
  • The help file and man don't make a mention of it, will look through google... – Mallow Sep 30 '14 at 8:51
  • here's my man: "mount [readOnly] [-mountPoint path] device Mount a single volume. If readOnly is specified, then the file system is mounted read-only, even if the volume's underlying file system and/or device and/or media supports writing; even the super-user may not write to it; this is the same as the rdonly option to mount (8). If a -mountPoint is specified, then that path, rather than the stan- dard path of /Volumes/VolumeName, will be used as the view into the volume file content; a directory at that path must already exist." – Mateusz Szlosek Sep 30 '14 at 8:52
  • Hmmm... I see the man online, and your man, and they don't match mine. I tried both sudo diskutil mount /dev/disk2s4 -mountPoint /Volumes/test and sudo diskutil mount -mountPoint /Volumes/test /dev/disk2s4 ... I suspect 10.4 doesn't have the -mountPoint feature. – Mallow Sep 30 '14 at 8:56
  • Does /Volumes/test exist before running this command? – Mateusz Szlosek Sep 30 '14 at 9:02
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"So my initial question is can I some how mount a drive to a specific folder, Like I would normally do in linux?"

Absolutely. The caveat is that the user who is mounting the volume must be the mount-point owner. You do NOT need to be root or use sudo to mount a disk.

The first thing is to identify your raw device. diskutil list will do that nicely.

For example, if I have a FAT32 USB stick that I want to mount in my home dir, I list my devices and see that my raw device is /dev/disk5s1. As a normal user, I can mount it in my home directory by:

mkdir ~/mount
mount -r -t msdos /dev/disk5s1 ~/mount

If you then cd ~/mount ; ls, you'll see the contents of the USB stick.

In this example, I mounted it read-only, but you can mount your device any way you like.

When you're done with the device, don't forget to unmount it, e.g.:

diskutil unmount ~/mount
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  • SUCCESS!!! mount -t hfs /dev/disk1s4 ~/mountpoint/ – Mallow Oct 1 '14 at 2:57
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    any way for this to happen automatically whenever I connect the same drive? – rmp251 Sep 3 '16 at 20:52
  • @rmp251, I don't think there's any way to automate this. That said, you may be able to create a script that you could run that would mount the drive with nothing more than a double-click. Assuming that you are mounting only one drive regularly, it should get the same device name every time you mount it. – Trane Francks Sep 6 '16 at 4:48
  • @rmp251 After you've mounted volumes, you can automate the mounts at login by dragging the mounted volumes into your Login Items within the Users & Groups / Accounts panel in System Preferences. – Trane Francks Apr 5 at 0:01

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