How do I ensure all of my extra (internal) hard drives are mounted by default upon boot up of Ubuntu 17.10?

Question

How do I ensure all of my other internal hard drives are mounted by default upon boot up of Ubuntu 17.10?

Every time I start my Ubuntu 17.10 computer and log in, I have to Open "Files" - then Click "+ Other Locations" to see the list of attached devices. Only once I do this am I able to look at the contents of these additional internal hard drives.

Here is my details when I edit fstab

# /etc/fstab: static file system information. 
# 
# Use 'blkid' 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> 
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation 
UUID=3b693200-e592-483d-9b74-701739be0c08 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
/swapfile none swap sw 0 0 
/dev/disk/by-uuid/508a6797-6705-48f9-b698-c9b7abb410e2 /mnt/508a6797-6705-48f9-b698-c9b7abb410e2 auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0 
/dev/disk/by-uuid/00aa1e3e-f053-4644-804b-e397c60551ba /mnt/00aa1e3e-f053-4644-804b-e397c60551ba auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0

I haven't edited this yet, but this is what I see. It appears as though auto is already there.

Is this a Bios setting or can it be solved by a setting in Ubuntu 17.10? Your advice or help would be appreciated. Thanks, Brett

Answer 1

As you can mount them by clicking on the drive in nautilus, your disks already have an entry in /etc/fstab.

Open a terminal by typing Ctrl-Alt-T. Then enter sudo nano /etc/fstab. Then look for the lines where your hard drives are mentioned and change noauto to auto. Ctrl-X will ask you whether to save the changed file and then exit the editor. Ctrl-D or exit will close the terminal window.

For further details see man fstab in a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T).

Addition with the knowledge of /etc/fstab entries:

gvfs is intended to work just the way you describe: the filesystems are mounted only when a user klicks on them in the GUI file manager (nautilus). If you want to mount them automatically, you have to define 2 mountpoints (e.g. two empty folders data1 and data2) and edit the entries in fstab (by editor or by the disks GUI):

<your uuid1> /home/<your userID>/data1 <file system type> defaults 0 2
<your uuid2> /home/<your userID>/data2 <file system type> defaults 0 2

where "your uuid*" are the unchanged first fields in the current entries, "file system type" is probably ntfs if your disks have been used in windows before or ext3 or ext4 if they have been used in Linux before.

Answer 2

If you don't want to modify your fstab file, you can use the disks gui tool instead. This should come pre-installed with Ubuntu.

Search for the disks application and launch it. You should see an interface similar to this.

Select the disk you wish to mount at boot on the left panel, then select the partition which you want to mount. In my image, I've selected the 1.0 TB Hard Drive as my disk, and the 1000 GB NTFS partition.

Once you've selected your desired disk and partition, click on the options button (the button underneath my cursor in the image above). Select Edit Mount Options.

Un-flick the Automatic Mount Options switch and enable the two checkboxes as seen in this image.

After which your disk should mount at boot.