Futurepixels

Working with linux over the past few years has been fun but it certainly comes with it’s frustrations. One of them for me is having to mount the drive when I need it, but this is because its not been that important to me to learn. So, tonight I decided to do a bit of reading up about it and learn then put that learning in to place.

For myself, I have two drives I would like to mount on boot as it would in Windows and macOS; “Linux Games” and “Media”.

To start, I will need directories to mount the drives too. To do this I went and created the following.

mkdir /games /photos

The next part is to add the drives to the boot process. This can be done in multiple places, but I am adding them to the /etc/fstab configuration. My reasons being that using /etc/fstab.d doesn’t exist on my distribution and using systemd is going to use the /etc/fstab config anyway.

You will want to first get the details for the drive(s) you are mounting, this is done via blkid which should give an output like so:

/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop1: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop2: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop3: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop4: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop5: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop6: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/nvme0n1p1: UUID="6EFE-AF5A" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="BOOT" PARTUUID="1e14628f-5553-41bc-b6a5-87bb9bdc5854"
/dev/nvme0n1p2: UUID="747adbc0-cf6b-45dc-8be6-4860321a199a" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="7739a89a-7d02-4aae-8b27-36d30111306f"
/dev/nvme0n1p3: LABEL="Windows" UUID="102ADBF10527806C" TYPE="ntfs" PTTYPE="dos" PARTUUID="90483ddd-d0c2-4885-b557-1d5d5255ece5"
/dev/sdc2: LABEL="Games" UUID="50FE5C80FE5C5FF0" TYPE="ntfs" PARTLABEL="Windows Games" PARTUUID="e933c8d2-a825-4186-b077-460e22e861dd"
/dev/sdc3: LABEL="Linux Games" UUID="c4460e59-3741-474d-8cd5-77505cfc4d80" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="09a79ba0-08d4-430d-827a-eb5a382fe7b5"
/dev/sda1: LABEL="spare" UUID="BCB4F111B4F0CEC0" TYPE="ntfs" PARTLABEL="home" PARTUUID="f181f4e0-02b1-48af-8aee-17c3bed3b803"
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="media" UUID="1fe37fc3-d7f0-43c1-8b6c-60dab8792c11" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="media" PARTUUID="279c5731-e0ea-431d-9c43-af3c4a1a142c"
/dev/sdd: UUID="6f546c4e-80a9-444d-a83d-668b4183bf2f" TYPE="ext4"

It is from this list that you need the UUID and the TYPE for your file system table [fstab] config. To make sure you get the correct data you can do the following:

blkid | grep "Linux Games" | xclip -selection clipboard

This will add the following line in this example to your clipboard directly:

/dev/sdc3: LABEL="Linux Games" UUID="c4460e59-3741-474d-8cd5-77505cfc4d80" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="09a79ba0-08d4-430d-827a-eb5a382fe7b5"

With your favourite editor open /etc/fstab, paste the line in your clipboard to the end of the file and create the following lines:

# /dev/sdc3 at time of setup
UUID="c4460e59-3741-474d-8cd5-77505cfc4d80" /games ext4 rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 2

Lets break that down to understand it further.

UUID - Most Linux systems don’t use the device as much these days which is why we are using UUID instead of /dev/sdc3 (the device) as that is what is preferred
mount point - This is where the filesystem will attach to; in this case /games
Filesystem type - This is the TYPE value so is ext4 in my example
options - The options are comma separated and a full list can be found at Wikipedia
Backup information - We use 0 here as we want to indicate that the filesystem will never be backed up in this example Integerity test order - This is to indicate which order the fsck program will check the device for errors. We use 2 here to check after boot as it’s not a root filesystem

Once we have added all the relevant disks that are permanant, save the file and test it works with sudo mount -a. Once that’s run you should be able to access the drive and the content via ls -l /games within the context of this example.

If you made any errors you will see the following type of error which should give more insight on what to look at fixing:

mount: /nopes can't find UUID="1234"

Previous Next