[SOLVED] Automounting hard drive - fscking unhappy!

[Bazu135]

I have an external hard drive that I use for data and media storage, and I'm attempting to get it to mount automatically. My computer very plainly doesn't like what I've done so far, though!

Based on this, having mounted the drive:

$ mount
/dev/sdf1 on /media/Neko.Storage type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096) [Neko.Storage]

I added this to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sdf1 /media/Neko.Storage         fuseblk  defaults        1 2

I restarted, and fsck threw a bit of a fit at me and put me in recovery mode - commenting out that line fixed the problem, and now I'm back to square one.

Evidently, I've done something wrong My first assumption based on the error messages is that fsck doesn't recognise the 'fuseblk' entry. I think the filesystem is ntfs (which presumably is what would replace fuseblk), but I'm not certain - is there any way to check this?

That said, is there any value in fscking the drive, or would that '2' be better set to '0'?

Finally, are there any steps I need to take beyond the /etc/fstab configuration?

Many thanks in advance!

[glennzo]

Simply make a mount point, get the UUID of the partition and mount that partition. Using my disk as an example.

PHP Code:

mkdir /mnt/storage
blkid /dev/sdd1 


/dev/sdd1: LABEL="sata500" UUID="b7fc2042-40be-46b9-9cce-69a5b043e044" TYPE="ext4"

Using copy and paste, add the UUID on a new line in /etc/fstab. Remember to remove the 6th character which is a ". Then finish off the line.

PHP Code:

UUID=b7fc2042-40be-46b9-9cce-69a5b043e044 /mnt/storage ext4 defaults 0 0 


PHP Code:

mount /mnt/storage 


This should mount at every boot. This is also an extremely basic method of mounting a partition. You may want more options but this should get you started.

In the case of an NTFS partition a basic fstab line would be

PHP Code:

UUID=b7fc2042-40be-46b9-9cce-69a5b043e044 /mnt/storage ntfs-3g defaults 0 0 


fdisk will tell you if it's ntfs or other.

PHP Code:

fdisk -l /dev/sdd 


[Jean Pierre]

That said, is there any value in fscking the drive, or would that '2' be better set to '0'?

Yes for setting to '0'. The last parameter is a request to do a file system check at boot time (see "man fstab"), but :
1) nobody has developed an ntfs file system checker,
2) had it been developed, it would last several minutes. Are you sure you want to spend that delay during boot ?

[Bazu135]

Working perfectly - thanks, Glennzo!

As a point of curiosity, if in future, I were to boot without that drive attached, would it just not mount it and move on, or would it likely throw a hideous error?

And thanks for the extra info Jean - much appreciated!