I have two 1TB HDD's formatted in NTFS, one has windows and other stuff i use even on linux and the other is all media. i can mount them easy, but this is a minor annoyance because everytime i log in i must type in my password. is there no way to have them auto mounted on startup?

thanks.

Welcome to LQ!!

How is the password relevant? e.g. are the individual drives password-protected?

To automatically mount, put entries in /etc/fstab

thanks for the welcome, i am very new to linux and ubuntu is my first linux OS.

ubuntu just seems to ask for a password for most the things i do, such as installing software, changing settings and mounting drives. i just think it would be nice to have both my hard drives ready to use when i log in. it's a minor annoyance but would be nice to fix. i will have a look at this 'fstab' thanks.

You will need the password to edit /etc/fstab, but it won't be needed each time the drives are mounted (unless they are encrypted or whatever). The password is needed to gain root* privileges from your user account, but the init process which mounts the drives at boot time runs with root privileges anyway.

This page gives an introduction to fstab. You would need to add lines along the lines of:

In the fourth field, I believe you will need to give the ids of the Linux user and group, who should own the files.

* Equivalent of Windows Administrator

thanks, im not sure what numbers to put in where you put 0 and 2 though.

Look at the fstab man page for an explanation of these fields.

oh thats strange, my '/' and '/home' partitions arent on fstab? or they seem to be put in comments so its not read, or am i reading it wrong? here is my fstab:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier
# for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name
# devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=7eb0067a-0232-4aed-8782-16da70eed205 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sda7 during installation
UUID=2d523f65-9d97-4066-a67a-e2b3b7c76322 /home ext4 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=bc314585-e75d-4f47-8fe9-4c03b92cdf1a none swap sw 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

They are there - the lines are the ones that start "UUID=" - the UUID is an alternative way of specifying the device. It takes a bit of getting used to, but is very useful as it can help avoid problems when changes are made to other partitions on a disk, which affect the ordering.

The comments at the top of the fstab file explain how to get the UUID for a filesystem.

ok thanks guys this is solved