The EndeavourOS experience has been remarkably smooth for me so far, but one of my biggest pain points has been adding a new internal drive. While I did eventually figure out how to add it to /etc/fstab, it was a substantial difficulty and caused a few boot failures while I struggled with the process. This is one of very few things that would make me hesitate to recommend Endeavour to friends transitioning from Windows or MacOS. Would it be possible to make EndeavourOS automatically add /etc/fstab entries for internal drives, using genfstab or similar?
My thought would be, what if that drive is only temporary? In the case of backing up or copying lots of data, internally connecting a drive temporarily can offer massive performance benefits for such tasks.
If such drives are automatically added to fstab, it’ll be painful when booting after they’re removed, and until you remove their it fstab entries again.
That said, using Partition Manager, and probably other similar tools, you can add drive mounts to fstab without needing to directly edit fstab yourself. This is safer than “automatic”, because you intentionally initiate it.
A fstab generator that you can choose to add to /etc/fstab yourself would be more beneficial in my eyes for the reasons @Bink mentioned. If you take out a drive and forget about its fstab entry, it will get really bad really quick.
As someone who’s been using Linux for close to 15 years on and off and over 3 years full-time, I can say that I would never recommend anything Arch-based to Windows users and even worse Mac users.
Despite how easy Arch has become, it is not for the everyday carefree user.
That said, I agree with the first two comments here. This is not a good idea on Arch.
At least, not for beginners.
I see, I hadn’t realized it would be a problem if the drive were removed. In that case, an fstab generator would be better. How do other operating systems manage to do it with less user interaction?
I know everyone’s experience with adding drives may be different, but it was simple for me. I just added an internal SSD with 2 partitions, one for my music, video, and documents backups and the other for Timeshift snapshots. There were no steps involved except to format it. I just used Disks and all was fine. No boot issues at all. The whole process from installing the Disk to ready-to-use took less than 5 minutes.
As someone who uses an internal drive I have a script that adds my internal drive information into fstab itself. Note I do not recommend replacing fstab with a Updated version I recommend appending to the already OS created fstab. The file i grab my internal from has the correct format for fstab and its easily appended. I prefer adding it after the initial install so as to ensure that the install completed without any issues. I would think that most Arch users at this point have their own way of doing the same task.
as you stated here you had to learn the appropriate way to do the task. By doing it this way when said program that automatically does it for you FAILS you will know how to do it Manually. This is priceless information that no automatic program can ever teach you.
I actually got it wrong when I tried to do it manually. Resorting to use of automatic config generation via genfstab was what made it work. While I appreciate the importance of learning how to do it manually, and normally I would love to deep dive the configuration options, I’ve been pressed for time lately, and that haste is quite possibly the root cause of my problem. (In short, yes, you’re right.)
It seems like using partitionmanager to add drives to my /etc/fstab is the solution I actually needed. Thank you all for politely correcting my ignorance. Thread has been marked as solved.
