If I have an external FireWire drive and I logout, the FireWire drive is dismounted by MacOS. Try it. Enable SSH, logout and then from another computer, ssh in and cd to /Volumes -- the FireWire disk loses both the mount and the mountpoint. With the disktook command, you can get the disk remounted from the shell: disktool -m disk1 However, what if you have TWO FireWire drives? This would be easy to fix doing it interactively with: disktool -m disk1 disktool -m disk2 but what if you are writing a shell script to accomplish this for a cronjob backup? Do I have to use the above two commands no matter what simply because I don't know if the user may have attached a 2nd FireWire drive? In addition, CDs seem to always mount as disk2 but I'm not 100% sure. Does anyone know the rules for filesystem numbering in OSX (10.3 and later) or can point me to a website that explains this? Thanks a bunch.