How do I get my internal HDD to mount at startup? Disks utility not working

It's either not intuitive or not working in Ubuntu 14.04.

I want to mount my internal HDD at at startup (I boot from an SSD). I attempt to set this, following this procedure:

1. Open Disks utility
2. Select the disk
3. Below the disk's Volumes, click on the More actions button
4. Select Edit Mount Options...
5. Select Automatic Mount Options "Off"
6. Under Mount Options, ensure that Mount at startup is selected
7. Click OK
8. Enter password into Authenticate dialog box
9. Restart

but this procedure doesn't work. Upon rebooting, and after Grub attempts to start Ubuntu, I receive the error message "An error occurred while mounting /mnt/4f721fc0-8072-453f-b48f-ca686bd89549. Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery". That identifier "4f721fc0-8072-453f-b48f-ca686bd89549" was automatically assigned by Ubuntu.

I press S and the boot process continues OK. If I try to mount the disk immediately after booting, I receive the error message "Unable to access "Storage"" (I named the volume Storage).

So then I start the Disks utility and set it to Automatic Mount Options "On" and reboot.

To me, it seems like this should work, but it doesn't.

Here are a number of photos of the process (Alt+PrtScn doesn't work after selecting More actions).

Solution 1:

I was trying Sudheer's suggestion today. I tried all the different Identify As options to no avail, as every reboot showed that it wasn't working correctly.

What was happening was that the drive itself was mounting correctly, but all the bookmarks were broken (Folders with Yellow on the left panel), therefore I was lead to believe that the drive was not mounting at all.

Then I realised my mistake and found out that when you select an Identify As option, it will set the the Mount Point to a default value (e.g. /mnt/[uu_id]).

This is not the mounting point I desired (e.g /media/[username]/[MountFolderName]) and it was incompatible with the bookmarks I have set on the Files Application.

So you need to set the Identify As option first, then set the Mount Point to your desired location. I basically fell in the same trap as user el_gallo_azul above, but I was lucky enough to finally spot the missing step required.

So the Disks utility definitely can automount and you shouldn't have to modify fstab.

I'm using Ubuntu 18.04 with a front end skin (POP O/S 18.10)

Solution 2:

Yes I finally did this (successfully, it seems so far) by editing fstab.

I would have preferred if it had worked after I tried the intuitive method in the Disks utility.

The process:

• Google search "ubuntu 14.04 mount internal hdd at startup"
• Open and read

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1571781&page=2 and

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1571781&page=3 and

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1571781&page=4 and

Unable to mount hard-disk at startup and

problem mounting second harddrive with ubuntu 14.04 and

How do I get my internal HDD to mount at startup? and

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab and

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=283131 and

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticallyMountPartitions#Per-User_Mounts

• Go to /etc/fstab file
• Right-click on file and run Script 'open-as-administrator'
• Add

# mount 4f721fc0-8072-453f-b48f-ca686bd89549/sdb1/Storage at boot
UUID=4f721fc0-8072-453f-b48f-ca686bd89549 /media/el_gallo_azul/Storage ext4    defaults 0       2

• Test by rebooting
• Determined to be successful by Dropbox not showing 'Dropbox folder not found' error message that it had always shown at the end of booting previously.

I'm now one step closer to getting BOINC to use my internal HDD instead of my SSD for its data directory. I'll keep chipping away until I achieve it.

By the way, I had a little look in the Disks utility settings after I did this, and indeed the settings were exactly the same as what I tried to set via the intuitive method.