how to: mount extra disks (non-boot disks)

maxreason · 12-26-2012, 07:21 PM

Not sure why, but the behavior of the nautilus file manager changed at some point. It used to show all the SATA and USB hard drives that were connected to the motherboard in the /media directory. It seems nautilus automatically mounted them when I clicked on them to access files.

Just recently all drives vanished from the /media directory, and I can't find a way to access them.

I guess I don't mind adding these drives to the /etc/fstab file, except that is inconvenient because I have more than 4 SATA drives, so now and then I need to unplug one drive and plug in another in its place, and the partitions might not always be the same on those two drives, which might cause strange behavior.

Nonetheless, I'd like to know how to add these drives to the /etc/fstab file, but the new documentation for mount and the fstab file is very difficult to comprehend. For one thing, how can I create appropriate entries when I can't see which partitions on each drive contain files, and which are swap partitions or other oddballs?

It would be a lot nicer if nautilus would just work they way it did before, but I'd also like to know other ways to deal with this.

PS: All the drives are very standard 1~3TB SATA3 seagate and western digital drives @ 7200rpm.

jschiwal · 12-26-2012, 10:14 PM

Instead of something like /dev/sdc1 in the first field of fstab, use the UUID of the file system, e.g. UUID="1234-A567".

You can look at "ls -s /dev/disk/by-uuid/" or use the "blkid" command as root to get the UUID number.

See the man page for fstab. It discusses using uuid to make /etc/fstab more robust.

disk -l will list the partitions, and whether it is a Linux partition or swap. You can first manually mount the partitions on /mnt/, look at the files there, then add a line in /etc/fstab. Also use "sudo file -s /dev/<device_node> to get more information on the file system.

widget · 12-27-2012, 09:54 PM

I have a number of installs on here and use data partitions so that all installs can access some common data.

The entry I am using in /etc/fstab for one such partition is;

Code:

#Entry for /dev/sda9 :
UUID=58e93156-4981-484c-8047-db53541eaff3	/media/Common	ext4	defaults	0	0

I recommend using;

Code:

sudo blkid

to get the uuid as you have all the info you need there and can copy/paste a lot of it direct or with littel editing.

If you use chroot to access other installs those should mount in /mnt.

All auto mounted partitions and so forth are usually mounted in /media.

In the example above we have the mount point as /media/Common.

To create the mount point is simple no matter where you want to mount the stuff. For my example of the fstab file you would need to run;

Code:

sudo mkdir /media/Common