Auto-mount partition & set as home folder??

dulpit

Hey, I'm sure this has been asked before, but I've googled everywhere and the results I get are confusing as hell.

I currently have my drive partitioned in 3, 1 for Windows, 1 for Linux (Ubuntu 10.10) and 1 for my data, which is the biggie.

I have yet to be able to figure out how to get the damn drive to automount, I always have to manually mount it, which can screw up music, etc. Ideally what I'd like is for the drive to automount, and my home folers in Linux (Videos, Downloads, Music, etc) to match those on the data partition.

Is this possible without messing with the partitions? Am I missing something obvious and straightforward??

I'd appreciate the help folks...

humbert

If I understand correctly you want to add an entry to /etc/fstab

Something like this:

/dev/sda6 /home ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2

Decent overview:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fstab

KAGY

dulpit wrote: »

Hey, I'm sure this has been asked before, but I've googled everywhere and the results I get are confusing as hell.

I currently have my drive partitioned in 3, 1 for Windows, 1 for Linux (Ubuntu 10.10) and 1 for my data, which is the biggie.

I have yet to be able to figure out how to get the damn drive to automount, I always have to manually mount it, which can screw up music, etc. Ideally what I'd like is for the drive to automount, and my home folers in Linux (Videos, Downloads, Music, etc) to match those on the data partition.

Is this possible without messing with the partitions? Am I missing something obvious and straightforward??

I'd appreciate the help folks...

To be able to use the data with both windows and linux you probably need to leave your data partition as FAT32 (or NTFS).
You should have a home folder on your linux partition, leave this as is, because it stores all your linux settings.
When your data partition is mounted you need to make links from your linux home to the documents etc folders. Without knowing what distro you are using I can't tell you how to do it graphically, you could try dragging with the right mouse button. If you want to use the command line you could try the ln -s command (see http://www.computerhope.com/unix/uln.htm for more info)

As far as automounting your partitions goes, you need to edit your /etc/fstab file as humbert says. If you say it keeps messing up your music, possibly the disk reference keeps changing (this can happen if you have different (external) drives plugged in on boot). The way around this is to use a UUID (an identifier that doesn't change). To find out more see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab

Hope that helps

dulpit

To clarify some points (I'm at work, so can't clarify everything exactly):

I'm using Ubuntu 10.10
I have an NTFS partition, which has folders of Videos, Music & Downloads.
I want to be able to click on Videos in Ubuntu and have the list of videos that are on the partition open up in this folder. (I only want to be able to do this for Music, Downloads & Videos, so that in the rare times I'm logged into Windows, the folders are synced and matched)

Oh and when I said it mucks up music when my partition doesn't auto-mount I mean that Rhythmbox is populated with music which is on the partition, so if I'm having a tired moment I try to play music before the drive has been mounted, which is irritating... (also causes problems with shared folders on Virtual Box)

pickarooney

edit /etc/fstab and add this line (changing sdc1 for whatever your NTFS device is and sharedrive for whatever location you want to mount the drive to)

/dev/sdc1 /media/sharedrive ntfs-3g defaults,force 0 0

Then type sudo mount -a to make sure you now have a /media/sharedrive/Music, /media/sharedrive/Videos etc. directory.

It should automatically mount on next boot.