How to permanently mount a drive in Linux (and why you should)

I at the moment have 4 laborious drives within my System76 Thelio desktop. The first drive serves as my working system and the others are strictly for housing several types of information. I’ve one drive for digital machines, one for music, and one for miscellaneous information. By laying out my system this fashion, even when the working system fails, my knowledge remains to be accessible.

I’ve these secondary drives arrange such that they’re routinely out there always. Within the Linux-verse, that is known as “automounting” and it is an essential job you may wish to perceive.

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Automounting is a factor as a result of when you might have secondary drives hooked up to a machine, they are not routinely out there to you upon boot of the machine. Sure, you may open your desktop file supervisor, navigate to the drive, and mount it by clicking the entry. Nonetheless, this may be problematic if you happen to neglect to try this and also you both have a backup configured to routinely save information to that drive otherwise you merely go to avoid wasting a file to that drive from an software. If the drive is not mounted, the app (or backup) will not be capable to entry the drive.

And that is why we all the time wish to configure these drives for automounting.

Let me present you the way it’s carried out.

Easy methods to automount a drive in Linux

What you may want: To make this work, you may want a working occasion of Linux, a secondary drive plugged into your machine, and a person with sudo privileges. I am going to reveal with Pop!_OS Linux however the course of ought to be the identical, no matter which distribution you employ. I may also assume the drive has been formatted. I all the time format my secondary Linux drives with the ext4 format. When you’re utilizing an NTFS drive (a Home windows drive), you may 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, you must see entries like this:

sda             8:0    0 931.5G  0 disk  
└─sda1          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  
└─sdb1          8:17   0 931.5G  0 half

If you cannot simply unplug the secondary disk, simply run the lsblk command. When you see two drives, sda and sdb, chances are high superb your secondary drive is sdb. For the aim of displaying this course of, we’ll assume the title of your drive is /dev/sdb.

Subsequent, change the possession of the brand new listing to your person with the command:

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /knowledge

The -R choice makes positive all baby folders have the identical possession.

On the backside of that file, add an entry like this:

/dev/sdb1 /knowledge    ext4    defaults        0       0

Here is a proof:

• /dev/sdb1 — the secondary drive
• /knowledge — the mount level
• ext4 — the secondary drive file system kind. If that is an NTFS drive, substitute with ntfs-3g
• defaults — makes use of the default choices
• 0 0 — these fields are for dump and fsck. Simply go away them each as zeros

Save and shut the file with Ctrl-X.

Testing the mount

All it’s worthwhile to do to check the mount is difficulty the command:

When you obtain no suggestions, all the pieces is nice. Now you can reboot your machine and the secondary drive will likely be routinely mounted so you may entry the information from /knowledge.

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Congratulations, you have simply efficiently arrange a secondary drive automount on Linux.