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I added an internal HDD which is used as a shared partition between Ubuntu 17 and Windows 10 (using this guide to set it up). Unfortunately, now when I boot Ubuntu the boot time is 5 minutes (instead of 30 seconds) as the system is mounting both Ubuntu (stored on an internal SDD) and the shared partition (on the HDD). Folders shared between Ubuntu and Windows on the shared partition are Backups, Documents, Music, Pictures, Public, Videos - so I don't envision how booting the HDD on a delay would cause problems when booting Ubuntu. (Of course, please explain it to me if I am mistaken.)

NAME   FSTYPE     SIZE MOUNTPOINT                   LABEL            
sda             931,5G                              
└─sda1 ntfs     931,5G /media/Shared                Shared
sdb             465,8G                              
├─sdb1 ntfs     367,3G                              
├─sdb2 ntfs       800M                              
├─sdb3 ext4      93,1G /                            
└─sdb5 swap       4,5G

Notes: sdb2 is Windows 10. sdb3 is Ubuntu 17.

Therefore, is there a way I can delay the mounting of the HDD until after Ubuntu is booted?

Please let me know if I can provide any additional information to explain my question / current setup.

Add'l info: output of cat /etc/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/sdb2 during installation
UUID=c391995e-3fcf-40a0-a300-d359bf55a668 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=d8f31d45-9319-45fc-b7a7-592e3097fa08 none            swap    sw              0       0
# swap was on /dev/sdb5 during installation
#UUID=e575692f-7baa-485c-a8cb-80ffda2b78f2 none            swap    sw              0       0
# Shared mount
UUID=44EC439A779EB78C /media/Shared/    ntfs-3g        auto,user,rw 0 0

What I have tried:

I made the change to the

/etc/fstab

as suggested (auto -> noauto for the shared drive). But with only this change, Ubuntu no longer boots properly (never reaches login screen, does not respond to keyboard input). Optimally the drive would mount on login without my manual intervention each time. I also tried adding the mount command to a script in

/etc/profile.d/

however still Ubuntu would not boot. Also, once I reverted the change to fstab, I noticed an error regarding the shared drive being mounted in read-only mode. Only booting once in windows and rebooting restored my ability to access the shared drive on ubuntu even after reverting all changes.

Allison Klopp
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  • can you please edit and paste the output of cat /etc/fstab, formated text with {} – cmak.fr Jun 16 '18 at 13:14
  • @cmak.fr : Added the output to post – Allison Klopp Jun 16 '18 at 13:28
  • Is Windows fast start up on? http://askubuntu.com/questions/145902/unable-to-mount-windows-ntfs-filesystem-due-to-hibernation Loading NTFS is a bit slower, but just a few seconds unless hibernated and then it has to time out and mount read only. You could create a manual mount script and either make it last or manually run it to mount it when desired. – oldfred Jun 16 '18 at 14:09
  • @oldfred : No, Windows fast startup is off. I'd like to continue to automatically mount the shared partition at startup when booting Windows and delay the mount of the shared partition when booting Ubuntu. – Allison Klopp Jun 16 '18 at 16:05
  • Have you recently run chkdsk from Windows on that shared NTFS partition? My old XP improved from 5 min boot to 3 min boot after several chkdsk runs, even though it did not show any errors. With that system Ubuntu was 40 sec, or why I liked Ubuntu better. – oldfred Jun 17 '18 at 00:43
  • @oldfred Running chkdsk on the shared partition had no impact on the boot time of either OS for me. – Allison Klopp Jun 19 '18 at 14:32
  • When you ran chkdsk in Windows, did you run it with the /R option so that it will scan the entire surface of the drive locate and recover bad sectors? Bad sectors or areas of the drive that can be corrupted can cause a drive a really long time to boot or to have files listed, mounted, etc. – Terrance Jun 19 '18 at 16:02
  • @Terrance : I just ran chkdisk with the /R option and after restarting I do not note a difference in load time. – Allison Klopp Jun 28 '18 at 12:58
  • What version of Ubuntu 17 is it? 17.04 or 17.10? Is it only slow in Ubuntu and not Windows when booting? One other change I can think of, try setting in the fstab to ntfs instead of ntfs-3g. – Terrance Jun 28 '18 at 13:07
  • I've got Ubuntu 18.04. OK I'll give it a go. Yes, it's just Ubuntu that is having slowness issues when booting. – Allison Klopp Jun 28 '18 at 13:08
  • @Terrance : There's no difference in boot time after changing ntfs-3g to ntfs in /etc/fstab. For reference, I'm seeing a 2min13s boot time from grub menu to login screen for Ubuntu and only 9s for Windows. – Allison Klopp Jun 28 '18 at 13:25
  • Did you upgrade to 18.04 over whatever version of 17 you had then? If it was having the issue before the upgrade then there is a good chance that the upgrade did not fix the issue. At this point I would think of backing up all your data then performing a clean install of Ubuntu to eliminate all software possibilities. Beyond this, I am out of suggestions as I have never bumped into an issue like this before so I would only be guessing from here on out. – Terrance Jun 28 '18 at 20:11
  • @Terrance : Yes it was an upgrade. I will do a clean install of Ubuntu when I get a chance and report back. Thank you for your help ! – Allison Klopp Jun 30 '18 at 08:21

1 Answers1

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Edit /etc/fstab: On the line related to your shared drive, change the option auto to noauto

UUID=44EC439A779EB78C /media/Shared/    ntfs-3g        noauto,user,rw 0 0
cmak.fr
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