How to Permanently Mount External/Internal Drives in Linux

When using external drives we have to manually mount them every time we log in to our Linux distribution or every time we want to use them. If you don’t remove them and use the drives as permanently connected external storage devices it would be great if we could auto-mount them every time we log in to the system.

In this article, we will be looking at how to configure these external drives as automounted permanent storage devices. Using this method you can mount almost all external drives (Externalahrd drives, USB Sticks …. etc.) or your internal drives.

NOTE1: Please replace all the values within < > with your own values.

NOTE2: All commands should be used in the terminal.

  1. Identifying the drive and its device label. To achieve this you can use the command lsblk in your terminal. !
  • In the above image the main three letters at the top of each tree view is the device label. Ex: sda.
  • The three letters followed by a number under the main three letters above the tree view are the partitions. Ex: sda1, sda2, …. etc.
  • In the above image I already have my externals mounted. The drives from sdc below are my externals. In your case, you would only see the drive label and the partition without a mount point in front of the partition details. So don’t panic it will get listed once we finish the mounting steps.
  1. After identifying the drive label make note of it or remember the correct label. Now we have to make a new folder as the mount point for our external drive. You can use /mnt or /run/media (Becarfule using this because It is usually a temporary file system not intended to hold persistent data) or any other location but I’m going to use `/mnt` for this tutorial. To make the new folder we can use the mkdir command.
sudo mkdir /mnt/<your mount folder name>
  • You have to use sudo otherwise you will get a permission denied error.
  1. We still can’t use the new folder we created in the above step. Due to using sudo the new folder belongs to root not to your user. So we have to get ownership of the folder before continuing to other steps. To do this we use the chown command.
sudo chown -R <your user name>: <your user group> /mnt/<folder name you created>
  • User group is similar to your user name. Ex: if your user name is ben then your user group will be ben. Unless you changed the user group.
  • -R switch makes the command operate on a file or a directory recursively.
  1. After owning the folder we still can’t write to the folder so we need to give the folder read and write permissions. To do that, we can use the chmod command.
sudo chmod -R 744 /mnt/<folder name you created>
  • Number 744 means you have assigned read/write/execute permissions to your user account. You have given read/write permissions to your group and others.
  1. There are many ways we can use to mount drives using fstab but the best way is to use UUID to map the drives. So before we continue to the next step we need to find the UUID s of the drive/s that you’re mounting. To find the IDs, we can use `ls` or blkid. I personally prefer blkid.

Using sudo blkid <your mount device lablel>

Using sudo ls-l /dev/disk/by-uuid

  1. After finding the UUID of your drive it is time to move on to editing the fstab file. Before starting the edit it’s always good to make a backup of the file. We can use the cp command to make back up.
sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bkp
  • Above command will make another copy named fstab.bkp so if anything goes wrong you can use that file to restore the original file.
  1. Open the fstab file in your favorite text editor.

sudo nvim /etc/fstab or sudo nano /etc/fstab or sudo vim /etc/fstab

The file should look something like below,

  1. Add the below code to the end of the fstab file.
UUID=<UUID of your external device> /mnt/<your mount point>       <file system Ex: ext4>    noatime,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.device-timeout=10,x-systemd.idle-timeout=1min 0 2
  • I’m using systemd.automount and systemd.device-timeout.
  • system.automount: Automount units may be used to implement on-demand mounting as well as parallelized mounting of file systems. You can find more information here.
  • systemd.device-timeout: Configures an idle timeout. Once the mount has been idle for the specified time, systemd will attempt to unmount. For more detail go here.
  • Using systemd is much better because using other methods sometimes the boot gets stuck if the external device fails to mount. But using this method boot continues after the time mount times out.

After editing fstab should look like below,

  1. Once making sure everything in the fstab is correct save and exit the editor. To make sure there are no errors mount the drives using the below command.
sudo mount -a
  • Above command will automount all the unmounted drives in the fstab file.
  • If there’s an issue with the file you will see error output in the terminal.
  1. If there are no errors then it’s all good. You can test your new mounted drive now. Afterward, you can do a system reboot and verify that the automount is working. The newly mounted drives should show up in your file manager.

Conclusion

This brings us to the conclusion of this tutorial. I hope this tutorial is simple enough so anyone can understand and follow it without any issue. Using UUID and systemd is the best way I found to mount drives.

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