I at the moment have 4 arduous drives inside my System76 Thelio desktop. The first drive serves as my working system and the others are strictly for housing various kinds of recordsdata. I’ve one drive for digital machines, one for music, and one for miscellaneous recordsdata. By laying out my system this fashion, even when the working system fails, my knowledge remains to be accessible.
I’ve these secondary drives arrange such that they’re mechanically out there always. Within the Linux-verse, that is referred to as “automounting” and it is an essential process you may need to perceive.
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Automounting is a factor as a result of when you may have secondary drives hooked up to a machine, they don’t seem to be mechanically out there to you upon boot of the machine. Sure, you possibly can open your desktop file supervisor, navigate to the drive, and mount it by clicking the entry. Nonetheless, this may be problematic for those who neglect to do this and also you both have a backup configured to mechanically save recordsdata to that drive otherwise you merely go to save lots of a file to that drive from an software. If the drive is not mounted, the app (or backup) will not be capable of entry the drive.
And that is why we all the time need to configure these drives for automounting.
Let me present you the way it’s finished.
The best way to automount a drive in Linux
What you may want: To make this work, you may want a working occasion of Linux, a secondary drive plugged into your machine, and a consumer with sudo privileges. I will show with Pop!_OS Linux however the course of must be the identical, no matter which distribution you employ. I will even assume the drive has been formatted. I all the time format my secondary Linux drives with the ext4 format. In the event you’re utilizing an NTFS drive (a Home windows drive), you may want to put in the ntfs-3g software program with a command like sudo apt-get set up ntfs-3g.
Within the output of that command, it is best to see entries like this:
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk ââsda1 8:1 0 931.5G 0 half
Plug the drive in and run the command once more and you may see a brand new entry like:
sdb 8:16 0 931.5G 0 disk ââsdb1 8:17 0 931.5G 0 half
If you cannot simply unplug the secondary disk, simply run the lsblk command. In the event you see two drives, sda and sdb, likelihood is superb your secondary drive is sdb. For the aim of displaying this course of, we’ll assume the title of your drive is /dev/sdb.
The mount level would be the listing in your main drive that can function a location you’ll entry the secondary drive from.
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This does not copy or transfer the recordsdata from one to the opposite however, somewhat, creates a spot for the working system to “mount” the secondary drive. Let’s create a mount level referred to as /knowledge with the command:
Subsequent, change the possession of the brand new listing to your consumer with the command:
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /knowledge
The -R choice makes certain all youngster folders have the identical possession.
The /and so on/fstab is the file accountable for mapping the secondary drive to the mount level.
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Assuming the title of your secondary drive is /dev/sdb, we’ll tack on a 1 to the tip (as a result of /dev/sdb1 is the primary usable partition). Open the fstab file for enhancing with the command:
On the backside of that file, add an entry like this:
/dev/sdb1 /knowledge ext4 defaults 0 0
Here is an evidence:
- /dev/sdb1 — the secondary drive
- /knowledge — the mount level
- ext4 — the secondary drive file system sort. If that is an NTFS drive, substitute with ntfs-3g
- defaults — makes use of the default choices
- 0 0 — these fields are for dump and fsck. Simply depart them each as zeros
Save and shut the file with Ctrl-X.
Testing the mount
All you must do to check the mount is problem the command:
In the event you obtain no suggestions, all the things is sweet. Now you can reboot your machine and the secondary drive will probably be mechanically mounted so you possibly can entry the recordsdata from /knowledge.
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Congratulations, you have simply efficiently arrange a secondary drive automount on Linux.
