[SOLVED] Automounting secondary HDs at boot

[werdigo49]

I have two SATA HD's used as data backups, and at bootup I must enter my password for them to be mounted. How do I get them to be mounted automatically, without password entry, at boot?

If I can piggyback another related question onto this one, my old Control Center had an entry called "Disks and Filesystems" that I found very useful, for changing mount points, enabling and disabling, etc. Is it still available somewhere in KDE 4.5.1? (It's related because I remember there was an option to mount drives at boot.)

Edit: PS: System Settings/Removable Devices/Enable Autologin is checked for both of these drives.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Automounting secondary HDs at boot

You state you have two sata drives you use as backup, but you mount them as removable devices?

Is that right?

[werdigo49]

Re: Automounting secondary HDs at boot

You state you have two sata drives you use as backup, but you mount them as removable devices?

Is that right?

Well, that's not something I actively DID. They're permanently plugged in, and screwed into slots in my desktop tower. But when I open System Settings, I find them under Hardware/Removable Devices.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Automounting secondary HDs at boot

Well, I believe they appeared there because they're not listed in /etc/fstab.

There are many options that may be format specific so I'm not going to write a whole page here - but basically, open a terminal, type kdesudo kate /etc/fstab to edit the file, add the other drives to the list and use the options user,noauto to have them available if you select them with dolphin but not mounted at boot or user,auto to mount at boot time. The advantage to not mounting them at boot (if you don't access them all the time) is a bit faster boot.

The entries look something like:

UUID=6218bf2b-ad9d-4839-ad71-f87ced20b80d /backup/a ext4 defaults,user,noauto 0 2

Obviously use your own UUID, mount point, drive format and so on.

[werdigo49]

Re: Automounting secondary HDs at boot

Thanks. That was going to be my next step. I've edited fstab's before, though it's been a good many years (mounting 100M parallel-port Zip disks, I think). With your suggestions it should be fine.

[werdigo49]

Re: Automounting secondary HDs at boot

I must have missed something in my edit of /etc/fstab. The two sata drives' reiserfs data partitions are mounted as /media/disk and /media/disk-1, but on the restart I was informed that "disk is not available or ready for use" --- something like that --- and that I could type "S" to skip. I received the same message about disk-1.

Meanwhile, I had posted a separate request about the old kde-guidance package, and received a reply that suggested MountManager. That did the job. Here's that thread:

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3113717.0

I'm going back to mark this problem as "solved."

[Snowhog]

Re: Automounting secondary HDs at boot

I must have missed something in my edit of /etc/fstab. The two sata drives' reiserfs data partitions are mounted as /media/disk and /media/disk-1, but on the restart I was informed that "disk is not available or ready for use" --- something like that --- and that I could type "S" to skip. I received the same message about disk-1.

'/media/disk*' mounts are 'temporary' and only exist when the device/partition isn't identified in ones /etc/fstab file but are accessed via your web browser or file manager (Konqueror / Dolphin). You can't uses those designations when adding an entry for them in /etc/fstab - you have to create the mount points to be used first:

sudo mkdir /media/mount_point_name

Then you can identify the mount point to be used in the /etc/fstab entry.

[oshunluvr]

Re: [SOLVED] Automounting secondary HDs at boot

Since you're using them as backup drives - you might want to make a mount point that makes sense:

/backup/a
/backup/b

or similar.