Hi,

I'm sure i've seen answers to this issue before so i apologise in advance for any redundancy in this thread, but i just can't seem to find them again and i don't remember them being much use...

anyway,

I have a 160Gb SATA HDD with five partitions. I'm familiar with editing my fstab file so that i can mount the drive manually using the mount command but how can i get it to automount at start-up?

I wasn't too concerned with this when it only had a single partition on it but I've just formatted it with FAT32, limiting the max size of each partition and it's obviously going to be a real pain to manually mount five partitions everytime i turn the computer on.

the "auto" keyword in the fstab does what you want.

thanks but no, it doesn't.

that's my point: the auto command doesn't actually work with SATA disks. I remember it's something to do with the order in which grub loads stuff up.

there's something i have to edit in the grub configuration but i've no idea what.

instead, i was wondering if it could be possible to write a shell script that would run automatically and execute the required commands?

are you sure? Grub has nothing to do with the disks not autoloading. The init process handles that. Anyway, about the next question, you can call anything on bootup at /etc/rc.d/rc.local (for slack). There is something similar in Debian. You have to give it the full filename for the script in order for it to execute.

positive, yeah. all the entries associated with the sata disk in the fstab produce 'special device sda* does not exist' messages at start up.

However, I managed to track down a script called bootmisc.sh which runs miscellaneous tasks at start up at /etc/rcS.d in Ubuntu and stuck the commands in there and it now works perfectly!

Thankyou very much for your assistance, you've saved me a ridiculous amount of hassle.

It does actually - the problem is not that it is a s-ata disk. The problem are the partitions. I had this problem several times. Your hd is never mounted - only the partitions on it are. If the S-ATA support didn't work, you wouldn't see your hd at all. You'll have to modify your fstab for now and make sure any user can mount the affected partitions, then create a startup script executed at login, that mounts those partitions. It's a workaround.