How to mount SD card before user login?
 

I have a Dell Latitude 2100 netbook running Ubuntu 10.04 which I use primarily as a download machine as it only consumes 7 - 8 watts as compared to 160+ watts for my quad core desktop ;) The netbook has only a FAST SSD drive but it is only 16 GB. I added a 16 GB SD card which permanently resides in the slot provided. This provides additional storage capacity.

I can access the netbook by ssh and VNC over my LAN to retrieve files or to start downloads. However, the SD card does not appear to mount until I login to the machine.

My question is... can the machine be configured to mount the SD card before login?

With the SD card mounted I find the following in /etc/mtab I added an entry to /etc/fstab and rebooted. I see /dev/sdb in /etc/mtab and can see the contents of the SD card over ssh. However, I cannot write to the card. If I comment out the reference in /ect/fstab, reboot and login I can again write to the card. I am probably missing something simple.

TIA,

Ken

It's either because the the SD card is mounted as read-only at boot-time or some permission issues. You could type "dmesg" in the terminal to see any errors/warnings and/or type "mount" to see if it is mounted as read-only or read/write.

You could also try to use the following entry in /etc/fstab:

Thank you cnxsoft for the prompt reply. I have added the additional parameters to the entry in /etc/fstab (but like an idiot I forgot to uncomment the line - rebooting again). I was going to add the entire line from mtab to fstab but I was not familiar with all of the parameters so I though I would be safer to only include those which I understood.

It works! Perhaps it was the uhelper=udisks parameter. I will have to look into what that does. It sounds intriguing and I do not recall seeing it before. Perhaps something to do with USB drives.

Thanks again!

Ken