Automatic mount of second drive in 15.04

Question

I have upgraded my Ubuntu to 15.04 from 14.x and I find that I have to manually mount the secondary drive for it to become operational. This is a pain since my /Downloads folder has been directed (by me) to this drive. There seems to be a way by editing /etc/fstab but I do not recall having to do this in the previous installation. Am I missing a simpler way?

Answer 1

The editing of the file is simple.

• Open a terminal and edit your fstab:

  sudo nano /etc/fstab
  

• Add a line, eg:

  UUID=a61d6eab-d90d-471a-8e9c-e9816b6c90cf /home           ext4    defaults        0       2
  

• Open a second terminal and run the command:

  sudo blkid
  

  Here is a sample output

  % sudo blkid
  /dev/sdb1: UUID="d89ae699-b2e9-4442-a292-4f27d36d3a9a" TYPE="swap" PARTUUID="000a178e-01"
  /dev/sdb3: UUID="a61d6eab-d90d-471a-8e9c-e9816b6c90cf" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="000a178e-03"
  /dev/sda1: UUID="d94f4097-91fe-4e96-89b2-7877065d0650" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="00096da5-01"
  

• Search your partition in the first column, eg. /dev/sda2. Take the UUID and replace the UUID (without the double quotes) in the added line in your fstab file.

• Take the type TYPE for the partition and replace the type in the fstab file.
• Replace the example /home in your fstab with your preferred mount point.
• Save the fstab file
• Mount the partition with sudo mount <your_mount_point>

Answer 2

It should not be difficult to mount your drive through fstab. Since you can manually mount it, I assume you have a mount point directory for it in /media. So just add a line to fstab like:

UUID=<whatever> <mountpoint> <file system> defaults 0 0

then issue the command

sudo mount -a

Note: you can obtain the UUID by

sudo blkid