Ubuntu – Automatically mounting USB drives on boot

automountusb-drive

I have a Plex media server installed on Ubuntu 14.04, which use two external hard drives (/dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdc1). I would like to automatically mount these at boot to /media/drive1 and /media/drive2 respectively. Is there any way I can do this in Ubuntu?

Best Answer

You can try editing the fstab file. Here is how to access it: nano /etc/fstab. On nano, you can use any editor install in your system, like Vi/Vim. The file will have headings which are self explanatory. It will have Mount point-Where you can the drive to be mounted, e.g /home/media. It will also have Type(File system type, e.g ext4) and others. Once you finish adding your drive(s) there, the drive will automatically be mapping itself there once plugged in.

Here is my edited answer

Check the files system of your drives by running df -T. For example you will see something like this

  Filesystem      Type     1K-blocks      Used   Available   Mounted on
  /dev/sdb1       ext4       10240        0       10240       /home

2. See the help provided in this post if you have problems with file systems.

Edit the fstab like this:

   #Device         #Mountpoint  #fs-type     #options     #dump  #fsck
 /dev/sdb1       /media/drive1    ext4        defaults      0      0
 /dev/sdc1       /media/drive2    ext4        defaults      0      0

You may find nothing configured in the fstab file but it's likely that the default boot drive is configured there. Go ahead and just edit the file exactly as I have shown in step 3.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to auto mount the external hard drive

I'm in a similar situation, except that my system worked just fine with 10.04. I have an external mybook hard drive that I use for backup using nfs4 and grsync. At the end of fstab I have these mount commands:

/media/mybook/laptop_backup /export/laptop_backup none bind 0 0
/media/mybook/laptop_D610 /export/laptop_D610 none bind 0 0
/media/mybook/laptop_www /export/laptop_www none bind 0 0

In 10.04, boot completed with these directories mounted and accessible over the network. When I upgraded to 10.10, the boot pauses with an error message regarding each one giving me the option to press S to skip or some other letter to manually fix the problem. Since I don't know how to fix it, I just skip (once for each directory) and boot completes. Manually executing sudo mount -a succeeds in mounting the directories. I guess the timing changed from 10.04 to 10.10 or something.

Note that there is no mount command for the mybook external USB 1 TB hard drive in /etc/fstab. So I guess the drive automounted in 10.04 and that's not happening in 10.10. I tried adding:

 /dev/sdd1 /media/mybook type ext3

But that failed in the same way that mounting the directories did.

Adding the nobootwait option fixed it. Oddly, it looks like nobootwait apparently causes the system to wait until the mount is completed, even though the man page says the opposite. Here's the commands from /etc/fstab:

/dev/sdd1 /media/mybook ext3 nobootwait 
/media/mybook/laptop_backup /export/laptop_backup none bind 0 0 
/media/mybook/laptop_D610 /export/laptop_D610 none bind 0 0 
/media/mybook/laptop_www /export/laptop_www none bind 0 0 –

Ubuntu – Auto-mounts ntfs drives in Read-Only Mode

fstab.BAK is a backup of your fstab file.
Remove all the ntfs entries from your fstab file. The backup fstab will also mount ntfs partitions, so we can't use it.
I think you should remove pysdm before you edit the fstab file.

I suggest you follow this guide to edit your fstab file.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to auto mount the external hard drive

Ubuntu – Auto-mounts ntfs drives in Read-Only Mode

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