Currently I have Linux Mint installed on my PC with a USB hard drive partition mounted as /home
. This is working well.
If I install a second USB hard drive, is there any chance Linux will get confused between the two, and try mount the second hard drive's partition as /home
on boot? That would be bad.
Coming from Windows, I've seen it happen often that drive letters are not "remembered" correctly causing all sorts of issues.
I guess the main question is: How does Linux actually know which USB hard drive is /dev/sdb
and which is /media/misha/my_2nd_drive
?
Best Answer
Usually the location of the USB port (Bus/Device) determines the order it's detected on. However, don't rely on this.
Each file system has a UUID which stands for universally unique identifier (FAT and NTFS use a slightly different scheme, but they also have an identifier that can be used as a UUID). You can rely on the (Linux) UUID to be unique. For more information about UUIDs, see this Wikipedia article.
Use the disk UUID as a mount argument. To find out what the UUID is, run this:
(
blkid
needs to read the device, hence it needs root powers, hence thesudo
. If you've already become root, thesudo
is not needed.)You can then use that UUID in
/etc/fstab
like this:There can then be no confusion about what disk is to be mounted on /home.
For manual mounting you can use
/dev/disk/by-uuid/.....