Mesanna's Weblog

Although Ubuntu has made it very easy to mount drives in recent versions, it often is simpler if a drive can be mounted when the computer boots. I’ve given below the steps to set a drive or partition to load on startup. This applies to Ubuntu and Linux Mint (and probably most Gnome based Linux distros).

Firstly, you need to establish the system location of your partition. You can either do this via the Terminal or, if you prefer a nice graphical interface, you can install GParted.

Ubuntu Hard Disk Naming

To explain a little further, the standard naming in Ubuntu for hard drives is /dev/sd# or /dev/hd# (sd# is for SATA and removable drives and hd# for IDE drives). The # will change depending on your system. For example, I have three hard drives on my system and they are named as follows:

/dev/sda
/dev/sdb
/dev/sdc

These naming conventions apply to the whole, physical drive. Partitions within these drives will have their own names. My main hard drive (sda) has two partitions and these are called:

/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2

My second hard drive (sdb) has one single partition which utilizes the whole drive and it is called:

/dev/sdb1

How to check the location of your hard disk

If you’re using the Terminal, open it and type:

sudo fdisk -l

Fdisk will output all the disks and partitions on your system. I’m presuming that you know the size of the partition and the file system (eg ext3 or NTFS) and therefore you’ll be able to recognize it from the list (I have a few drives/partitions and it can get a little confusing!) Take note of the path to the drive you want to mount (we’ll say for this example that it is /dev/sdb1). Also take note of the file system being used, as you will need it later.

Create a mount point

Everything in Linux is a file. Even a hard disk! This is a little strange to Windows users but it’s the way it is in Linux. To automatically mount your disk, you have to assign it a directory. The usual place to mount drives (and this includes CD-ROM and USB drives) is in the /media folder located in the root directory. In the terminal, to change to the media directory, type:

cd /media

Decide what you want to call your drive and create a directory in that name. I intend to use mine for Virtual Machine software so I’m going to call it vm. Type the following (changing vm to your drive name):

sudo mkdir vm

Note that Linux is case-sensitive so vm is different to VM and different again to Vm.

Set the drive to mount on boot

For the drive to mount automatically when you start Ubuntu, you need to add it to the fstab file. Firstly, backup your existing fstab file with the following command:

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab_backup

Open the fstab using the following command:

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

You need to add a line to the bottom of this file and this depends on the type of file system you are mounting. I have given examples below. In each case, you will need to change the /dev/sdb1 part to the location of your partition (as figured out above). Change the /media/vm part to whatever you called your directory. Save and close the file when you’re done.

For an ext3 Linux partition, use the following: (This works for ext4 too. Just change the file system to ext4):

/dev/sdb1 /media/vm ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro,users,user_xattr,user 0 0

For an NTFS drive, try this:

/dev/sdb1 /media/vm ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

For a FAT32 system, try this:

/dev/sdb1 /media/vm vfat umask=000 0 0

Take ownership of the partition

Finally, if this is a Linux partition, you may want to take ownership of it. If you’re just using this drive to store files etc. it quickly becomes a pain when you have to open it as root every time you want to copy over a file. To do this, you need to change the permissions on the folder. The basic code to do this is as follows:

sudo chown -R YourUserName:YourUserGroup /media/YourFolderName

For example, if my user name is mesanna and my drive is called vm, I would type:

sudo chown -R mesanna:mesanna /media/vm

And that should be that! You can reboot your computer if you like to check that it automatically loads up your new drive.