Re: fstab: mounting external hard drive

[NN_il_Confusionario <pinkof.pallus@tiscalinet.it>]

>     * From: Daniel Dalton <daniel.dalton@iinet.net.au>
>How can I mount my external hard drive on boot up?

Is the external disk a usb one?

If it is, is usb-storage (and the module for you usb chipset) already
loaded when mount -a is executed by the scripts in /etc/init.d/ ?
(You could add the needed modules to /etc/modules , if necessary)

>Also it should be read and writeable by all users...
>/dev/sdb1      /media/daniel-external      ext3      none      rw
>But no luck.

First manually mount

mount -t ext3 -o noatime,$OTHER_OPTIONS /dev/sdb1 /media/daniel-external

If it works, then the fstab line shoud work (once " 0 0" is appended at
the end and once the needed modules are loaded before mount -a is
executed by the boot scripts)

Finally, note that once on /media/daniel-external/ you have mounted
/dev/sdb1 then the owner, group and permissions of the directory
/media/daniel-external/ are those of the / filesystem on /dev/sdb1

So a chown and chmod once the disk is mounted should be sufficient an
persistent.

Consider also mounting by UUID or LABEL instead of /dev/sdb1 since for
removable drives this is usually a much better way to be sure you are
mounting the correct disk / partition.