mounting NTFS drive at startup

[m0nk3y]

I apologize in advance as I'm sure this is a repost, but I couldn't find any good results in my search. I am running two drives. One has two partitions, one for sabayon and one for windows. The other is an NTFS drive i use for file storage so both operating systems can access it. I would like to mount this storage device on startup, but i'm not sure how to go about it. Any help on this is greatly appreciated.

[WarraWarra]

Not sure about start up mounting but if it is in /etc/fstab then likely it would mount as default.

Manually = pc next to start button left bottom and "storage media" then double click the actual hd / windows disk to open.

Someone with proper info will post here or see the wiki top right of this page or search the forums top right side of this page.

[wolfden]

It should be auto doing it.

It mounts my winxp and vista, I have no problems access and using either or.

[m0nk3y]

Both the XP drive and the storage drive show up in my storage media automatically, but they don't appear to be mounted at startup. When I try to play music from my playlist, it can't access my files until I manually access the drive.

[Fitzcarraldo]

The FAT32 Windows XP partitions on my dual boot laptop and on one of my two external USB HDDs are recognised but not mounted automatically. The same applies to my other NTFS USB HDD. However, all I did was to set up a shortcut (properly called a ‘Desktop Config File’) on my SL Desktop in order to make it easier for me to browse the contents of a folder on the Windows XP partition. Icons for the NTFS and FAT32 external HDDs appear in the Main Panel and I just click on them and select Mount to mount them. However it is possible to mount them automatically as I will explain further on.

To be able to quickly browse the My Documents folder on the Windows XP partition, I set up a Desktop Config File (shortcut) to open the URL:

media:/sda2/Documents and Settings/Fitzcarraldo/My Documents

If I double-click on this Desktop Config File, it mounts the Windows partition and then opens a window showing the folders and files in the My Documents directory.

There are several ways to mount these FAT32 and NTFS partitions automatically. One would be to create a Desktop Config File to run the following (drive may be different on your PC) as root, and put it into your KDE Autostart directory:

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mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/Windows

as I had partitioned my HDD so that /dev/sda2 is the partition with the Windows XP C Drive.

The file /mnt/Windows already existed when I installed SL but, if it had not, I could have created it by typing the following into a Terminal window as root:

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mkdir /mnt/Windows

If I had wanted to, I could have chosen another name for the mountpoint instead of “Windows” (“C”, for example). If you have several FAT32 and/or NTFS partitions then you would need to create the appropriate number of directories with different names, of course.

Note that, to change the owner and group, and make everything read/write, and mount the Windows XP C drive automatically when booting SL, I could have added the following last line to the existing /etc/fstab file instead of creating a Desktop Config File:

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    #<Filesystem> <Mountpoint>  <Type>    <Option>                           <dump>  <pass>
    /dev/sda6     /             ext3      defaults,user_xattr                1       1
    /dev/sda3     /boot         ext3      defaults,user_xattr                1       2
    /dev/sda5     /home         ext3      defaults,user_xattr                1       2
    /dev/sda7     swap          swap      defaults                           0       0
    tmpfs         /dev/shm      tmpfs     defaults                           0       0
    /dev/sda2     /mnt/Windows  vfat      users,uid=1000,gid=100,umask=0000  0       0


For NTFS instead of FAT32, the last line above would be a little different, but it's not complicated and is explained on a Gentoo Wiki page (see the URL below). To understand the meaning of the fields in the fstab file, read the following Gentoo Wiki page:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Mount_MS_W ... _(FAT,NTFS) <--- For some reason this forum editor is not including the closing bracket in the URL if I click on the link. If this happens to you, type the missing ")" at the end in the address bar of your browser and hit Enter to get to the correct Web page on the Gentoo Wiki.

which explains the meaning of umask and tells you how to find your uid and gid.