Having problems with 2nd hard drive.

[charles052]

For some reason, my 2nd hard drive doesn't just 'wake up', when I start or restart my computer. I cannot browse it via samba until I wake it up by browsing it with Dolphin. I get the feeling this is a bad thing because I've had a WD hard drive already go out and I hardly ever used it for anything but storage and I've got a bad feeling the same could happen to this one unless I fix this and it's a pretty darn good drive, a 1tb WD black to be precise.

So, do I need to remount it somehow or what?

[oshunluvr]

Is this a 2nd HD installed in your computer?

If you're using samba to access it, it's gonna be slow and not automatically mounted. Why not mount it via fstab?

[charles052]

Yep, using samba. I'd like to try something else, but samba works pretty good and I'm afraid anything else would be just too complicated for me. Although, if you have a better alternative, I'm listening.

Haven't tried fstab yet? Will look it up when I have time and update.

[vinnywright]

a second hard drive or additional partitions are not usually mounted at boot.

it is perfectly safe to leave it this way .....and just access it with dolphin as you are doing.......is there some reason samba is diferent than using dolphin in this case?
IF you need it mounted at boot you can make a mount point for it and add it to /etc/fstab .
OR use system settings>removable devices , to set it to mount automatic

VINNY

[jglen490]

a second hard drive or additional partitions are not usually mounted at boot.

...
VINNY

Really? Perhaps, if you're talking about a removable drive, but most assuredly not if you're referring to an internally mounted one. That's the whole point of an internally mounted drive - it's part of the routinely accessed and used components and has important and routinely accessed and used data.

[vinnywright]

Really? Perhaps, if you're talking about a removable drive, but most assuredly not if you're referring to an internally mounted one. That's the whole point of an internally mounted drive - it's part of the routinely accessed and used components and has important and routinely accessed and used data.

no,,,,,,not so .

you can have ,,,,,,,lets say 4 internally installed hard drives with ,,,,lets say 7 partitions each and have a scenario where only 1 partition from 1 hard drive is mounted at boot.

the ONLY hard drives and partitions that will be mounted by default on a clean install are the drives and/or partitions that were setup during the install process.

for instance on this laptop I have 1 500Gig hard drive with 7 partitions ,,,,3 of these partitions contain a Kubuntu install on 1 of the installes 3 partitions get mounted at boot / , /home and swap
on 1 of the others only 2 get mounted at boot / , and swap and on the third 4 partitions get mounted / , swap , /dev/sda3 as /mnt/disk , and /dev/sda7 as /mnt/disk1

ONLY what is listed in /etc/fstab will be mounted at boot (unless you are using the "removable devices" settings in system settings) and /etc/fstab will only contain the drives and partitions that you set up and assigned during the install proses

VINNY

[jones.young]

Really? Perhaps, if you're talking about a removable drive, but most assuredly not if you're referring to an internally mounted one. That's the whole point of an internally mounted drive - it's part of the routinely accessed and used components and has important and routinely accessed and used data.

Not necessarily; there are many instances where one would choose not to automount drives which are mounted internally. For example, the workstation I am on right now has 6 hdd, 4 of which are a raid10 storage/backup array which is left suspended until their partitions are truly required. Another example might be found in removable drive bay/ghost/clone usage; where the bay is used to diagnose/repair and/or install an OS before it is installed in another machine.

Specifically, networked shares are typically not mounted at boot, but automounted as they are accessed/packets exchanged.

That being said, mounting drives/partitions with fstab is actually one of the easiest things to do in linux, and probably more guides written about fstab than you can read in a month. Further; if the 2nd drive is located within your machine, then fstab would be the most logical, preffered, and default method if you let the installer do it automagically.

Take a look at this article from the ubuntu documentation for more about it; https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab

The article looks complicated, but only because fstab has so many features that can be used, but not usually required. In fact, most fstab entries follow the same default template that has been used for more years than I can count.

/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 ext4 defaults 0 0

That's all it takes to automount an internal drive at boot.

Chew on that article and google it a little, see if it fits your needs; if you have questions, let us know.

[jglen490]

Again, really?

My original install was one hard drive, with the usual cast of characters: /, /home, and swap. I later added a second hard drive (internal) to accommodate a /HOME$/multimedia directory. This second drive is an integral, though extended, part of my installation. It is ALWAYS mounted at boot (via fstab), immediately shows up in Dolphin, and remains there until shutdown. Perhaps it has made cold boot a bit longer, but having it immediately available as wanted is a far better solution than having it take that time to come in and out, based on demand. I do have various removable (external) USB hard drives that come and go as I need them and are mounted only as they come in.

Therefore a second (or third or fourth or etc.) internal hard drive is not by definition in a class of devices excluded from mounting at boot. That's what I mean by "really?".

[jones.young]

Oh, by no means, does "additional drive" denot it should be exluded at boot; I only meant to show examples where one would not desire mounting at boot. However, I tried to point out that any internal drive would usually be mounted at boot, by default if you let the installer have its way, and thus; mounting all presently available, internally connected hdd, at boot, via fstab, could be considered the default behaviour.

We could say that letting unused drives lay idle at boot saves power, lowers heat, and reduced noise. Lowering the amount oof disk space will also lower the amount of requests to those drives, specifically from file indexing services or other applications which scan active drive space- media player "autoscan-for-new-media" type settings for instance. Free up a bit of RAM as disk cache, maybe..

All of these assumptions depend on the system and certain setups: 2 drives probably wont matter in the context of power savings, heat, and etc. Once again using a typical workstation as an example, it is undesirable to mount a large raid array at boot when you may not even access the data on that array for over 24 hours- So instead, we mount the system drives and leave the "backup" drives dormant until an actual backup event occurrs. 4x 10,000 rpm drives DO matter in the context of power, heat, and noise.

As for the time it takes to manually mount an internal drive which is not otherwise mounted at boot; 1 click, 1 second. With the correct fstab entry, the drive is available as soon as you click on its mount point's directory.

Ultimately, just providing further thought and consideration of other factors on the subject; your mileage may vary, but the best part of linux is there are so many ways to skin a cat, you can custom tailor a solution to almost any problem when you begin to understand how each component works

[vinnywright]

Again, really?


Therefore a second (or third or fourth or etc.) internal hard drive is not by definition in a class of devices excluded from mounting at boot. That's what I mean by "really?".

well of course not ..........we were talking "by default" and by default only drives and partitions that were set up during install are added to /etc/fstab .

when YOU added your second hard drive you had to add it's partitions to /etc/fstab it did not just happen by it's self .........

I will agry that an installed hard drive should have the partitions you need mounted at boot but if it was not set up during install you will half to do it your self.


VINNY

[oshunluvr]

I think the points Vinny is trying to make are:

#1: Linux defaults toward security, not accessibility (think viruses). Therefore, drives/partitions (more correctly "file systems") not needed by the system to run are not mounted at boot by default. There is no assumption be the developers of your (our) OS that every piece of every bit of data within your world is needed at boot time. This is up to you to decide.

#2: Being Linux (opposed to Windows or Apple), no one has pre-determined for you how you should access your data - again, up to you. We are expected to make our own decisions about things like this and take responsibility for them. On top of that - ALWAYS more than one way to skin the cat with Linux. There are several different ways to set up additional hard drive access.

This is why my initial answer was rather obtuse: I cannot decide for you what works best in your setup. In my world, most of my internal drives are all in fstab but not mounted at boot. I don't use them all every minute of every day (backups, storage, etc.) but I want them right at hand so they are defined in fstab. A simple click in Dolphin brings them up. On the other hand; a couple of them are used all the time so they are mounted during boot.

So Charles, define how you use the file systems on that drive and we'll offer ways to make that happen.

[charles052]

Truth be told. I'm now thinking about creating a small server or just buying one that I can save my stuff to and everyone on my network can access without problems. Probably get a 3 tb HD or something to go in it.

That'll save me a lot of trouble I think. Anyone got any ideas. I've seen a few standalone products on sale for external server storage and such.

In the mean time, I set my 2nd hard drive to mount upon logging in like suggested since I share stuff via samba through it. I would like to use something different other than samba because I've heard NFS is so much better, but I have 2 winblows computers and it's kinda hard for a novice like me to set up a server that works with them.

Though I have to admit, samba does work well for me.

[Buddlespit]

Truth be told. I'm now thinking about creating a small server or just buying one that I can save my stuff to and everyone on my network can access without problems. Probably get a 3 tb HD or something to go in it.

That'll save me a lot of trouble I think. Anyone got any ideas. I've seen a few standalone products on sale for external server storage and such.

In the mean time, I set my 2nd hard drive to mount upon logging in like suggested since I share stuff via samba through it. I would like to use something different other than samba because I've heard NFS is so much better, but I have 2 winblows computers and it's kinda hard for a novice like me to set up a server that works with them.

Though I have to admit, samba does work well for me.

I took an old amd socket 'A' computer that I had sitting in my attic, threw in a 40gb harddrive and installed ubuntu server 12.04. I used it to install a teamspeak3 server for my wife. I have since upgraded it to be a samba server, dns server, dnla media server, ftp (file) server, two teamspeak3 servers. When I upgrade either my computer or my wife's computer, the server also upgrades. Currently it's an am2 with 4gb memoery and 2TB of harddrive space in /home.

[oshunluvr]

I built a server for us several years ago. I wanted small footprint so I got a Mini-ITX small case that has four hard-drive hot swap trays built in. I have an Atom based mini-itx mobo, 6TB total drive space, and dual NIC's on the mobo. The case (with power supply) cost more than the CPU/mobo.

It does duty as a file server (both NFS and SAMBA), DLNA/media server, print server, torrent server, backup server, scanner server, mythtv/dvr server, web server, etc. It has no monitor, mouse or keyboard (during initial install it did obviously) and no desktop environment. I access it through ssh or webmin. It's been running Ubuntu server 12.04 LTS since it came out and 10.04 LTS before that and it has virtually no down time. I only reboot when a kernel update requires it.

[charles052]

I'd love to build a server, for the challenge alone if nothing else. Unfortunately, 1) I'd have no place to put it other than the living room and 2) my wife hates the whirring of the fans and HDs in the media center I have in there now, I can't imagine how loud a server would be. Yes, I can build a quiet server, but for my purposes, meaning superquiet, I'd have to use all SSDs and go as fanless as possible. That'd put the cost upwards to $700-1000 for a build, regardless. Which wouldn't be bad if I wasn't broke right now and looking for a job (no worries, I have a good job lined up if necessary, but it required a boatload of travel and I want something near the house).

So my current network is just fine as is right now. Everything works so I'm not going to complain (although, I want to. Guess that's just the perfectionist in me. LOL). Thanks for all your input guys. I learned quite a bit about networking and servers so it sure wasn't a waste, believe me.