I have an external USB hard drive connected to my Ubuntu laptop home server that I used to store MythTV recordings and videos. Ubuntu would mount this USB drive to the mount point I had created when I logged in as my regular user, but not at boot. I wanted the drive to automatically mount at boot so that after a power failure, or a reboot, I wouldn't have to log in as a user in order to have MythTV work. After doing some research using Google I tried the following:
- After logging in as my regular user to make the USB drive mount, I ran
mountin a terminal which gave me a listing of all the mounted disks and their mount settings. I copied down the mount settings for the USB drive and noted which device the USB drive was mounted as (sdb1 in my case). - Then I ran
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuidwhich gave me a listing of the UUID of each mounted partition and I copied down the UUID for the sdb1. This is the unique identifier for the USB drive. - Then I made a backup copy of the fstab file:
sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak - Then I opened the fstab file in an editor:
sudo nano /etc/fstab - Then I added a line to the bottom of the fstab file like this, putting a tab between each value, and using the UUID I noted, the filesystem type I noted, and the mount options I noted:
UUID=07955830-0d54-443c-bdba-f111121f6bd3 /media/myth_data ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks- Then I rebooted and the disk was automatically mounted without me having to log in.
