Mounting NTFS disc through graphical Gnome Disc Manager seems "incomplete"
I have a 800GB NTFS partition (/dev/sda1) with a lot of data and gigabytes of games, including my Steam folder. If I manually open /dev/sda1, and then open Steam, all my games appear installed as expected.
However, If I set /dev/sda1 to mount on PC start through the GUI, Steam doesn't see the disc as mounted, even though it is.
What is it that manually opening the disc does, that mounting doesn't? Would a script encounter the same issue? (Ubuntu 20.04, freshly installed)
Thanks in advance, any answer welcome.
"Manually" mounting a disk by clicking on its icon in the left pane of the file manager will cause the system to mount the drive in a specific folder, that is automatically created when you mount the drive, and removed when you unmount and/or eject the drive. That folder will reside under /media/, and the name of the folder will be the volume label of the partition. If the latter is not set, the unique identifier (UUID) of the partition is used. The latter is a large string of letters and numbers.
If you set a partition to mount on startup using the Gui (that will then likely be the tool "Disks"), your drive is mounted on a specific folder should exist or be created ahead of the mount. That folder is decided upon by you, the system administrator, by filling in "Mount point" in the "Mount Options" dialog.
Whether you will see an icon for a partition that is set to automatically be mounted on startup, depends on where the mount point (i.e., folder where the partition is accessible) resides.
An icon will be shown in any of these three cases:
- the partition is mounted somewhere under /media
- the partition is mounted somewhere under your home folder
- you explicitly provide the mount option
x-gvfs-show
Else, no icon will be shown for the mounted partition.
In your specific case, you may be confused because the drive may be available in another folder if you have it mount automatically on startup.
A specific caveat with ntfs partitions is that they must be "clean" before linux will correctly mount them. Make sure to have the drive regularly checked from an MS Windows system, and make sure the drive is properly closed when Windows shuts down - that requires you to turn off "fastboot" in windows.