Issue with mounting 2nd drive on boot

Bonjour tout le monde,

I have finally fully installed linux mint and have been working on getting everything up and running. So far, I haven’t had many issues, but I am having trouble with my 2nd drive. I just want my 2nd drive to mount on boot, and for programs to be able to write to it.

I have looked up guides on pulling up the disks in mint and going into the mount options and selecting mount on boot. This works, but for some reason, programs lose permission to write to it. When I switch the drive back to ‘user session defaults’ programs can write to it, but it doesn’t mount on boot. I haven’t found anyone mentioning this problem so I thought I would post here. Also, my home folder isn’t encrypted and when I go to permissions on the drive, it says ‘permissions could not be determined’

Thanks

possiblylinux127,

How is it formated? It isn’t NTFS or FAT is it?

WeebLife,

No, I formatted it to ext4

possiblylinux127,

Good you should be able to chown it to your user. Also for more long term storage I would recommend btrfs

HouseWolf,

You have to add the drive to a file called ‘fstab’ to have it be mounted on launch

If you want a video guide here’s the one I learnt to do it from.

It is kinda annoying Linux doesn’t seem to have a decent auto mount solution yet especially for people like me with 6+ drives in their machine.

WeebLife,

I followed this video and the auto mount works, but my programs still can’t write to it due to lacking permissions…

skullgiver, (edited )
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

WeebLife,

I have done the chown user command and that did fix the problem. My programs are able to write to it now. Thanks for the help

harsh3466,

Instead of using the gui for this, have you tried. creating a mount point and adding an entry to /etc/fstab?

Edit: fixed stupid autocorrect

WeebLife,

No, I did see some tutorials on using that, but they said that any mistake could result in crashes and having an ubootable pc… so I didn’t want to risk it.

DeaDvey,

You can always boot a live environment and edit the file from there if anything goes wrong.

harsh3466,

You do need to be careful, but you can check for errors after editing /etc/fstab by running the command sudo mount -a. With the drive attached but not mounted. (Also good practice to use the UUID of the drive in the fstab entry)

That command runs through etc/fstab and attempts to mount everything it is instructed to mount if it is not already mounted. And if there is an error it will let you know.

If you run sudo mount -a and you get no output in the terminal, then there are no errors, your drive should now be mounted, and you should be fine for reboots and it should mount on startup as expected.

WeebLife,

I followed the video tutorial that was in another comment and it worked but my programs still can’t write to it due to lacking permissions

possiblylinux127,

NTFS?

WeebLife,

No, ext4

possiblylinux127,

In that case you can use chown

WeebLife,

I followed another commenter’s guide using that command and it worked, thanks

harsh3466,

At the terminal, go to the directory that contains the mount point for the disk (so if the mount point is /mnt/disk go to /mnt.

Run ls -l. This should list everything in /mnt with the owners and permissions. If your mount point (in this example disk) is owned by user and group root, then you just need to change ownership of the mount point and the disk attached.

With the disk attached, run sudo chown -R user:user disk

Replace each instance ofuser with your system username (if you’re not sure what you’re username is run whoami and it will tell you), and replace disk with your mount point directory.

Here’s what this does:

  • sudo: escalates your privileges to run the chown command
  • chown: the utility that allows you to change ownership of files and directories
  • -R: tells chown to change ownership recursively
  • user:user specifies the user and group that will own the files/directories you are modifying.
  • disk: specifies the file(s)/directories you want to change ownership for.
WeebLife,

Thank you! This worked!

harsh3466,

Awesome! Glad I could help.

Sentau,

I love this comment because it explains the keywords in the command. Hats off to you.

possiblylinux127,

Backup the file and have a live USB ready just in case.

WeebLife,

Already had to use it and timeshift back lol.

kuneho,
@kuneho@lemmy.world avatar

You can always check its consistency if you run a mount -a after editing fstab. But yeah, an error in the file can cause some annoyance-

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