[SOLVED] Requesting help mounting a directory at system startup time

[bswilson]

Friends,

I need some help to solve a weird problem. I recently switched from Ubuntu to Fedora, after using Ubuntu for about 8 years. I've found Fedora really great. However, when I built my brand new Fedora box, I decided to mount a different disk as /media to house my music, videos, and photos. On my old Ubuntu system, I kept some of this in my home directory and that isn't terribly efficient, etc. The problem is, when I boot my computer, /media is not mounted. When I issue the command sudo mount /media, it mounts with no problem. How can I set my computer up so that /media mounts when I start/reboot my computer?

Here are some data points.

Output of /etc/fstab after booting:

#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Sat Sep 17 07:44:12 2011
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
/dev/mapper/vg_eminem-lv_root /                       ext4    defaults        1 1
UUID=1abb75a9-8635-4916-b52e-d82778407c2f /backup                 ext4    defaults        1 2
UUID=b32a3c77-c6a1-46cd-830c-cbacc05e7754 /boot                   ext4    defaults        1 2
/dev/mapper/vg_eminem-lv_home /home                   ext4    defaults        1 2
UUID=180f4025-92f9-4087-b4dd-4adbe77686c2 /media                  ext4    defaults        1 2
/dev/mapper/vg_eminem-lv_swap swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
devpts                  /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
sysfs                   /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
proc                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0

Output of df -h |grep media after booting:

tmpfs                 3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /media

Output of mount command after booting:

tmpfs on /media type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,rootcontext=system_u:object_r:mnt_t:s0,seclabel,mode=755)

After I run the command sudo mount /media, the output of mount looks like this:

tmpfs on /media type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,rootcontext=system_u:object_r:mnt_t:s0,seclabel,mode=755)
/dev/sdb2 on /media type ext4 (rw,relatime,seclabel,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered)

Can anyone guide me, please?

[surmabhopali]

the defaults options in fstab is "rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, and async"...and "nouser" means that only root can mount the device...so according to me you should try changing "defaults" i.e. fourth column this link may help..

http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

[jpollard]

What release of fedora are you using?

Fedora 15/16 moves /media to a memory disk that is handled by udev.

If you want something mounted permanently you need to mount it somewhere else - one suggestion is a mountpoint in /mnt (such as /mnt/media) instead of /media.

/media is now aimed at SD cards and other external USB storage. These should be automatically mounted as /media/<name> where name may be taken from the storage media. Internal disks (such as those listed in /etc/fstab) have to be mounted elsewhere.

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by jpollard

/media is now aimed at SD cards and other external USB storage.

To be fair, /media was added to the FHS specifically for this purpose. "Media" mean CDs, DVDs, external storage devices etc., not "multimedia".

So yes, use a non-system directory, such as /mnt or /mnt/media etc.

Gareth

[bswilson]

Ah, I see! Yes, I'm using Fedora 15. I did not know this about /media, so I'll change that and report how it goes. Thank you!

---------- Post added at 01:24 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:06 PM ----------

All, I was able to execute mv /media/* /mnt/media/* and now my system works perfectly. Thank so much for the help.

[marvin_ita]

Originally Posted by bswilson

All, I was able to execute mv /media/* /mnt/media/* and now my system works perfectly. Thank so much for the help.

Maybe I'm missing something... with the command mv you moved all the data you had on the secondary disk onto the primary disk in the /mnt/media folder. Now you don't have the data in the secondary disk, but in the primary, and the secondary disk is not mounted at startup in the /mnt/media folder!
Is it this you wanted?

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by bswilson

All, I was able to execute mv /media/* /mnt/media/* and now my system works perfectly. Thank so much for the help.

Yes, that confused me too.

Have you now got your media partition mounted on /mnt/media (and listed in /etc/fstab)? And were the files previously somehow copied into the tmpfs mounted on /media? Unless we're missing something, you'd better check that everything is indeed where you think it is!

Gareth

[bswilson]

Gareth, you and marvin_ita are absolutely correct. I don't think I have things set up the way I want. I am going to start a new thread to get additional help.

It does appear that now my /mnt/media/ folder is in the same logical volume group as /home, which means I really have all my stuff on the same physical disk, which is not what I want.

Thank you.

[surmabhopali]

first copy your all /media back to where it was....and then edit fstab...