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I presently have 4 onerous drives within my System76 Thelio desktop. The first drive serves as my working system and the others are strictly for housing several types of recordsdata. I’ve one drive for digital machines, one for music, and one for miscellaneous recordsdata. By laying out my system this manner, even when the working system fails, my information remains to be accessible.
I’ve these secondary drives arrange such that they’re routinely accessible always. Within the Linux-verse, that is referred to as “automounting” and it is an vital job you will need to perceive.
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Automounting is a factor as a result of when you could have secondary drives connected to a machine, they are not routinely accessible 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. Nevertheless, this may be problematic if you happen to overlook to do this and also you both have a backup configured to routinely save recordsdata to that drive otherwise you merely go to save lots of a file to that drive from an utility. If the drive is not mounted, the app (or backup) will not be capable of entry the drive.
And that is why we at all times need to configure these drives for automounting.
Let me present you the way it’s accomplished.
Methods to automount a drive in Linux
What you will want: To make this work, you will want a working occasion of Linux, a secondary drive plugged into your machine, and a person with sudo privileges. I will show with Pop!_OS Linux however the course of needs to be the identical, no matter which distribution you utilize. I may also assume the drive has been formatted. I at all times format my secondary Linux drives with the ext4 format. If you happen to’re utilizing an NTFS drive (a Home windows drive), you will 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’s 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 will 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. If you happen to see two drives, sda and sdb, chances are high superb your secondary drive is sdb. For the aim of exhibiting 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 /information with the command:
Subsequent, change the possession of the brand new listing to your person with the command:
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /information
The -R choice makes positive all youngster folders have the identical possession.
The /and many others/fstab is the file liable 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 /information ext4 defaults 0 0
This is an evidence:
/dev/sdb1 — the secondary drive/information — the mount pointext4 — the secondary drive file system sort. If that is an NTFS drive, substitute with ntfs-3gdefaults — makes use of the default options0 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 it’s essential do to check the mount is situation the command:
If you happen to obtain no suggestions, all the things is nice. Now you can reboot your machine and the secondary drive shall be routinely mounted so you possibly can entry the recordsdata from /information.
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Congratulations, you have simply efficiently arrange a secondary drive automount on Linux.