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macourtney7
Asked: 2017-01-10 06:09:17 +0800 CST

How to auto mount a secondary, internal HDD so a symbolic link to it will work from startup?

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My system has a dual storage configuration that consists of a PCIe SSD where the OS is located and a secondary, internal HDD for general mass storage needs.

I can easily mount the HDD via the GUI and I've created a symbolic link to it which works after I've mounted the HDD via the GUI. However, prior to taking the aforementioned step my symbolic link will not work.

Is there a way to remove the need to mount the HDD manually so my symbolic link always works?

command-line

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    What you're doing via GUI is that you're mounting the filesystem. Once a filesystem is mounted, files can be accessed ( if the drive is mounted with appropriate permissions ).

    There's a couple things you can do to make your life easier:

    1. Mount the filesystem at boot via /etc/fstab file. Obtain the UUID of that partition via sudo blkid command. Write a line in /etc/fstab that should look roughly like this:

      # The 400 GB partition on the native HDD
UUID=8e344ab1-5eb5-4e20-becd-4147fffd439f /mnt/HDD ext4 noatime,nodiratime,rw

      The example above is my actual setup. As mentioned in comments , I've a symlink to folder on that 400 Gb partition. If hard drive is mounted at boot, the symlink always works (of course , you have to ensure that you mount filesystem at proper directory and symlink is pointing to right file/folder).

    2. If you wish to mount the filesystem on-demand, use this command for mounting: udisksctl mount -b /dev/sdX , where /dev/sdX is device file of that filesystem. This is essentially the same thing that GUI method uses. This can be scripted as well

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