Mount a drive on Ubuntu

Mount a drive on Ubuntu

Mounting a drive on ubuntu is a rather simple procedure but some important parameters are often forgotten on the tutorials I found online when I first configured my Raspberry Pi as a media server running on docker containers.

1. Find your drive details

Many guides online are not really clear on this part so I will try to give the information I wished I had when I started.

In linux, a disk is a physical storage and it can have one or more partitions, each formated with its own filesystem (eg. ext4, ntfs, vfat, …). In linux, every file and directory is under the root directory /. Partitions are mounted on directories, usually we mount external storage under /mnt.

To get a good understanding of that, running the command lsblk with optional columns can help (lsblk --help gets you a list of all available columns).

• command

• Copied!

  lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,TYPE,FSTYPE,MOUNTPOINT,UUID,VENDOR,MODEL,LABEL
  

• result (scroll ==> to see details)

• NAME     SIZE TYPE FSTYPE   MOUNTPOINT        UUID                                 VENDOR   MODEL                LABEL
  loop0     49M loop squashfs /snap/core18/2252
  loop1     49M loop squashfs /snap/core18/2289
  loop2   57.5M loop squashfs /snap/core20/1274
  loop3   57.5M loop squashfs /snap/core20/1332
  loop4   60.7M loop squashfs /snap/lxd/21804
  loop5   10.6M loop squashfs /snap/nmap/2504
  loop6   60.7M loop squashfs /snap/lxd/21843
  loop7   10.6M loop squashfs /snap/nmap/2534
  loop8   37.7M loop squashfs /snap/snapd/14982
  sda    223.6G disk                                                                 SABRENT  SSHD
  ├─sda1   256M part vfat     /boot/firmware    5C4B-68A0                                                          system-boot
  └─sda2 223.3G part ext4     /                 34fa43d2-724c-4b32-81d5-123c567abc12                               writable
  sdb      3.7T disk                                                                 StoreJet WDC_WD40NPZZ-00PDPT0
  └─sdb1   3.7T part ntfs     /mnt/data         12A34B56C78D9123                                                   Transcend_4TB
  

You should be able to identify your drive easily and write down the FSTYPE and UUID. At this point your drive should not have a mountpoint.

We will use UUID instead of NAME of the partition as the UUID will stay the same between boots or if you use a different usb port.

2. Configure mount at boot

Linux uses /etc/fstab (file system table) to determine what and how partitions should be mounted at boot time. We will edit this file to configure our mount.

sudo nano /etc/fstab

add this line at the end of the file (change UUID, File System Type according to previous part).

# /etc/fstab
# [Device] [Mount Point] [File System Type] [Options] [Dump] [Pass]
UUID=12A34B56C78D9123 /mnt/data ntfs uid=1000,gid=1000,nosuid,nodev,nofail 0 0

Then write out with ctrl+o and validate with enter and exit with ctrl+x. If you want more details about what we wrote up there, expand this next section.

3.2 fstab and mount options

Expand section

You can find info on the fields with man fstab and man mount, but here is a summary.

item	value	Description
[Device]	UUID=	Universally Unique Identifier for the partition to be mounted
[Mount Point]	/mnt/data	Where the partition will be accessible from in the linux file system tree
[File System Type]	ntfs	The data structure of the partition we mount
[Options]	uid=	userid for the mount
[Options]	gid=	groupid for the mount
[Options]	nosuid	For security, prevents files on mount to set userid
[Options]	nodev	For security, prevents system from interpreting character or block special devices
[Options]	nofail	allows boot to continue if mount fails
[Dump]	0	set to 1 do dump filesystem
[Pass]	0	set to 1 if root filesystem

The user and group parameters (uid and gid) are very important. When we want to manage access to this directory from docker containers or samba user later on so we will check that it works later on.

3. Mount and verify

You can now enter mount -a in the terminal, it looks through /etc/fstab and mount all the devices as described there. Now that the mount is done, let’s check it is there and ownership is set correctly.

• command

• cd /mnt
  ls -l
  

Confirm that you see your userid and groupid for the mounted directory

tip: Should you have any trouble following this guide, have a look at the detailed linux manual section on mount, also accessible from terminal with command man mount.