Questions[fstab](ubuntu)

I have recently installed a new hard drive to my Ubuntu 10.0.4 box. I used System -> Administration -> Disk Utils to format the disk (ext4 file type) - but did not create a partition (is this advisable?).

I have manually mounted the drive as /mydata.

I want to have the machine automatically mount the device on startup/reboot. How may I do this?

[[Update]]

This is the output from running sudo fdisk -l on my system:

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000858bf

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1       59334   476595200   83  Linux
/dev/sda2           59334       60802    11789313    5  Extended
/dev/sda5           59334       60802    11789312   82  Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/sdc: 16.0 GB, 16026435072 bytes
254 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1956 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16002 * 512 = 8193024 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1               1        1955    15641929    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

I've deleted my existing swap partition due to some partitioning problem. I don't have a swap space now so I've created a swap file with:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/myswapfile bs=1M count=1024

Here's after swapon -s:

/root/myswapfile    file    1048572    1320    -1

Now I want to edit my /etc/fstab to enable the swap file after reboot.

I have two partitions that I want to mount on startup:

/dev/sda3   /mnt/devel  ext4    defaults    0   2
/dev/sda2   /mnt/excess ntfs    defaults    0   2

The ext4 partition mounts fine (owned by me, writable only by me), but the NTFS mounts owned by root with R\W permission for all.

How to fix this?

drwxr-xr-x  7 amanda amanda 4096 2012-03-14 19:07 devel
drwxrwxrwx  1 root   root   4096 2012-03-14 22:38 excess

I've got an entry for an external harddrive in my fstab:

UUID="680C0FE30C0FAAE0" /jgdata ntfs noatime,rw

But sometimes this drive isn't plugged in at boot time. This leaves me half way through a boot, with a prompt to "Continue Waiting, press S or press M" but no keypress has any affect at this stage (including Ctrl-Alt-Delete, not even caps-lock).

Short of writing a script to check the output of fdisk -l, how can I mount this drive at boot time only if it is present? It would be handy to have an fdisk entry for this drive, so I can just type mount /jgdata instead of needing a device name.

The last two fields on each line in fstab (dump and pass) are some numbers (usually, 0).

What do these numbers mean?

# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
UUID=030ccf66-5195-4835-ba3e-f5d7a5403c05 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1