[Tutorial] How to Permanently Mount External/Internal Drives in Linux

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
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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 automount 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.
    lsblkCommand

    • 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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>

NOTE: You can use $USER instead of your actual user name and user group.

  • 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.

  2. 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>

    diskUUID
    diskUUID1674×110 32.3 KB

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

    diskUUIDUsingLs
    diskUUIDUsingLs903×212 61.1 KB

  3. 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.

  4. Open the fstab file in your favorite text editor.

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

    File should look below,

    fstabInNvimWithoutExtrenal
    fstabInNvimWithoutExtrenal1050×352 40.7 KB

  5. 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 boot get stuck if the external device fails to mount. But using this method boot continues after the time mount times out.

    After editing the fstab file should look something like below.

    fstabInNvimWithExtrenal
    fstabInNvimWithExtrenal1756×368 62.9 KB

  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.

  2. 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.

    mountInFileManager
    mountInFileManager1908×1041 46.8 KB

Conclution

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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Be careful creating permanent mounts in /run/media. It is usually a tmpfs not intended to hold persistent data.

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I prefer that the mountpoint be owned by the root. Individual directories on the mounted drive can then be owned by whatever user needs them.

If my user needs to own the entire mountpoint, then I make it in my user’s home directory.

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Edit: Added @dalto 's warning to the article.

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Huh…wait but why then auto-mounts like KDE creates as

/run/media/${USER}

? :thinking:

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Using systemd.mount, isn’t there any need for nofail mount option in case the external drive is not plugged in at boot time?

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Do you mean the files created when USB drives get auto mounted? That’s because /run/media is the default for automounting. That’s why @dalto said it’s not a good place to create persistent mount points.

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because those are temporary

No, systemd-automounts are mounted on access and never cause problems with booting.

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Timeout take care of that. After 10s it lets the boot continues. It doesn’t hold up the entire boot if the drive is missing or broken or not mounted.

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I get it! Thanks!

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Are you sure? I have never seen mine pause boot for the timeout window when the device isn’t connected.

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happened to me twice after our electricity decided to play hide and seek. :smiley:

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A very good tutorial! :+1: Didn’t know about the systemd entries and I’ve been doing this for a number of years.

Just a thought… for old users like me and new users to linux, how about a tutorial section in the forum.
I’ve read the wiki but sometimes may not be enough detailed information. A step by step tut would come in handy.

And btw way more personal! :handshake: :wink:

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Yep… replying to myself. :rofl: Did a quick search for tutorials and found this - https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/why-dont-we-have-a-place-for-tutorials/17098

It was marked as a solution.
It’s very hard to ask questions, get answers and advise from Wikis.

I find forums can be be a more helpful (personal) place to get help.

Again… Just a thought…

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(post deleted by author)

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Nothing gave me as much headache as auto-mounting drives with the appropriate permissions when I first switched to Linux. I’m sure a lot of newcomers will find this useful.

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As you found out later on I already asked the question :smiley: . But I marked the thread as solved because of @Bryanpwo’s answer. And at the time I was the only one seeing the need so after big boss said that it’s pointless to argue ;P. But they will look into it if enough people from the community ask for something like that. Most of the tutorial stuff posted here will be added to the WiKi because most of the writers are from the WiKi contributor community.

Can you elborate on this one. You want a step by step on istalltion? or?

Setting the mount point to /run/media won’t going to break your system. But it’s being a temporary file system the data inside of it is not persistent. If you’ve used /run/media to perma mount a drive using fstab. Then just point the mount point path in fstab to you /tmp folder.

Ex:

UUID=<UUID of your external device> /tmp <file system Ex: ext4> noatime,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.device-timeout=10,x-systemd.idle-timeout=1min 0 2

If you have used the mount command to mount it the just unmount the drive using sudo umount <device|directory> and then mount the drive back to /tmp .

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Putting a permanent mount in /tmp is probably no better or worse than putting it in /run/media. Those are both temporary locations typically mounted on a tmpfs.

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Let me think on this for awhile. Okay?

btw… I’ve not been this intrigued in a forum in years.

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