Booting to GRUB and Data Drive Won't Auto Mount

[mhumm2]

Hello;

I was a 11.04 user and started having some problems which are irrelevant now. I attempted a fresh install of 12.04 64 bit and [stupidly] blew away my data HDD (/dev/sdb1). I finally installed to the correct drive (/dev/sda1), repartitioned the data drive (1 primary partition using ext4). Here's a ~$ df output:

mark@Mark-AMD64:~$ df -a -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1       141G  6.1G  128G   5% /
proc               0     0     0    - /proc
sysfs              0     0     0    - /sys
none               0     0     0    - /sys/fs/fuse/connections
none               0     0     0    - /sys/kernel/debug
none               0     0     0    - /sys/kernel/security
udev            3.9G   12K  3.9G   1% /dev
devpts             0     0     0    - /dev/pts
tmpfs           1.6G  904K  1.6G   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            3.9G   80K  3.9G   1% /run/shm
/dev/sdb1       466G  7.1G  435G   2% /media/Data

Issue one: My system boots to a grub menu and 30 seconds later continues to the default kernel, which is correct, but I would like that to be done directly. Why is the GRUB menu screen coming up on the first place and how do I change that behavior?

Issue two: For some reason, the bootup stops and informs my that the Data drive is not ready or cannot be mounted. I then have the choice of S-skipping, or M-manually configuring the drive. I select the skip option and the bootup procedes. Once up and running, I have no problem opening Dolphin and selecting the data drive which mounts perfectly.

Here's my fstab file output:

# <file system>                                              <mount point>   <type>  <options>               <dump>  <pass>
proc                                                                         /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid     0       0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=ad1b9992-0f2e-4422-be35-94e8ddb1697b          /                  ext4    errors=remount-ro          0       1
#
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation 
UUID=108ff39a-beda-4f75-8a98-1db538918b11          none            swap    sw                                0       0
#
# 500 GB HDD /dev/sdb added by Mark as a Data drive
UUID=386acc52-c710-4337-9e4a-d68a8e77b8b7       /media/Data     ext4    auto,user,sync             0       0

Could this have something to do with the data drive having the OS installed to it by mistake? Perhaps I didn't partition/format correctly. I really don't know and certainly have no clue where to start. I think I know enough about Kubuntu to be extremely dangerous. Please advise.

mhumm2

[james147]

Issue one: My system boots to a grub menu and 30 seconds later continues to the default kernel, which is correct, but I would like that to be done directly. Why is the GRUB menu screen coming up on the first place and how do I change that behavior?

You can edit the timeout and other options by editing /etc/default/grub and then running sudo update-grub to regenerate the grub config files.
The lines that are of interest are:

GRUB_TIMEOUT=XX

where XX is the number of seconds you want it to wait, I generally lower this number to about 4.

#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=5

#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true

You can uncomment these two lines (remove the # from the start of the line) to hide the menu entirely as well as hide the count down timer. Though there isn't much point in hiding the menu if you have already set GRUB_TIMEOUT to a sensible time.

Note that if you press a key during the count down it will stop it and wait for you to do something. So you don't have much to worry about by setting a shorter timeout.

Issue two: For some reason, the bootup stops and informs my that the Data drive is not ready or cannot be mounted. I then have the choice of S-skipping, or M-manually configuring the drive. I select the skip option and the bootup procedes. Once up and running, I have no problem opening Dolphin and selecting the data drive which mounts perfectly.

Cannot say I have ever seen this problem, is it an internal or external drive?

UUID=386acc52-c710-4337-9e4a-d68a8e77b8b7       /media/Data     ext4    [B]auto,user,sync[/B]             0       0

Do you really need these options? user allows normal users to mount/unmount the drive and implies noauto as it is normally used to allow users to mount drives after boot... This is most useful to removable drives. The auto overides this and mounts the drive automatically on boot, but then do you really want users to be able to unmount the drive? Finally sync makes the os block until data is written to the drive and stops the performance boost you normally get from asynchronous data transfer. This option is also most useful on external drives when the user is prone to just unplugging the drive without unmounting/ejecting it first.

So, if this is an internal drive then I would suggest removing these options and replacing them with the default option. If its an external drive then is there anyproblem with letting udev handle the mounting? (Which dolphin will do when you try to access it)

[doctordruidphd]

Just a couple of quick comments:

If Data is an external drive, then you want to change the auto option to noauto , otherwise it will ask you every time at bootup.

If Data is an internal drive, if yo reformatted it then its UUID changed.

sudo blkid

will give you the new UUID to paste into fstab.

[mhumm2]

Thank you for your replies.

#1: The GRUB setting will help alot. Thank you. Is displaying the GRUB menu the default behavior for 12.04? I've never seen that behavior ever and I started with 8.01.

#2: First of all, the drive is an internal SATA 2, 500GB HDD. I partitioned it the KDE Partition Editor and since I selected the ext4 fs, I assume it's formatted; it's accepting data again so it must be. I then ran sudo blkid and pasted that uuid into my fstab so I think the order of operations is correct from your advice. The options were my attempt to correct the behavior of the OS to not mount the drive automatically at boot up. I could remove all of the options since the ones I need (e.g. auto) is the default anyway.

I still don't understand the behavior and I really think it has something to do with the fact that accidentally targeted it for a 12.04 installation. Perhaps I should redo the HDD using fdisk from a console. Please keep the suggestions coming. In the mean time, I have a GRUB menu to edit.

mhumm2

[james147]

Thank you for your replies.

#1: The GRUB setting will help alot. Thank you. Is displaying the GRUB menu the default behavior for 12.04? I've never seen that behavior ever and I started with 8.01.

The default behaviour use to be to only display the menu if there was more then one operating system detected on the system, otherwise hide it. I don't think this has changed in the recent releases though I cannot be sure.

#2: First of all, the drive is an internal SATA 2, 500GB HDD. I partitioned it the KDE Partition Editor and since I selected the ext4 fs, I assume it's formatted; it's accepting data again so it must be. I then ran sudo blkid and pasted that uuid into my fstab so I think the order of operations is correct from your advice. The options were my attempt to correct the behavior of the OS to not mount the drive automatically at boot up. I could remove all of the options since the ones I need (e.g. auto) is the default anyway.

I still don't understand the behavior and I really think it has something to do with the fact that accidentally targeted it for a 12.04 installation. Perhaps I should redo the HDD using fdisk from a console. Please keep the suggestions coming. In the mean time, I have a GRUB menu to edit.

UUID's get regenerated when you write a filesystem to the partition, so would have changed when you repartitioned the drive and recreated the file system (KDE partition manager auto formates the drive with the chosen format (ie ext4) when you create a new partition and thus regenerates the UUID). If the UUID changes then you need to update /etc/fstab to reflect these changes.

Note: sudo blkid caches the UUID and so might not report the correct UUID if it recently changed. You can run sudo blkid -c /dev/null to force it to void the cache and get the more up to dates numbers.

[mhumm2]

Okay James147, that's the 2nd post you've solved for me in as many days. Thank you. This one is going into my Kubuntu Configuration Notebook! I just rebooted without the system waiting to mount my data drive.