New HDD - Press S to skip mounting

[fumbles22]

Hello,

I had a problem with my old 2Tb hard drive, so I swapped it out with a new one. I made sure that the new drive I bought was Hitachi since they apparently have the lowest failure rates. If anyone's interested, the one that broke was a Samsung.

Unfortunately, my computer keeps coming up with an error: "Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery".

I had a look at this thread and it talks about using Disks and the fstab file.

I haven't really used Disks. I tinkered around in it to try and get the drive to automount, but it didn't work. I ended up reversing everything that I did.

Here are the contents of my fstab file:

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# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>

#Entry for /dev/sda1 :
UUID=c53c76a3-c6a0-4249-9806-7b56e72e365a	/	ext4	errors=remount-ro	0	1
#Entry for /dev/sdb1 :
UUID=325ED1F424F1D86E	/media/Emmett_Brown	ntfs-3g	defaults,locale=en_GB.UTF-8	0	0
#Entry for /dev/sda5 :
UUID=567cd368-c79d-4231-89ab-d7e3b10483c2	none	swap	sw	0	0

I had a bit of trouble finding this since I was led astray by the fstab.d folder which was empty! (Hint: Scroll down etc).

I can see the problem. I still have my old drive (Emmett_Brown) present in the file. I need to modify this to accommodate my new drive called Disgo (same name as USB stick I once owned). I've formatted this to JFS. How do I do this?

It would also be great if there's a way to get it to automount.

[fumbles22]

Hello again,

I managed to figure it out! I took the plunge and decided to have a go editing the fstab file myself. I was quite scared that i'd mess up another hard drive, but everything worked out.

Here is my fstab file:

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# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>

#Entry for /dev/sda1 :
UUID=c53c76a3-c6a0-4249-9806-7b56e72e365a	/	ext4	errors=remount-ro	0	1
#Entry for /dev/sdb1 :
UUID=b09f4464-9313-44b5-befe-29f488244b4e	/media/Disgo	jfs	defaults	0	0
#Entry for /dev/sda5 :
UUID=567cd368-c79d-4231-89ab-d7e3b10483c2	none	swap	sw	0	0

#,locale=en_GB.UTF-8

Yes, you are reading the last line correctly. I edited the Emmett_brown line but, for some reason, it didn't work with the "locale" part left in. I took it out and everything worked.

For other people looking to do this here is what I did:

1). I opened /etc/fstab. You can reach this by going on Thunar and clicking "File System". You will need to open this as root so right click on some blank space and click "Open Folder as root". Alternatively, type in "sudo gedit /etc/fstab" in a terminal. Change this command for the text editor of your choice (eg. if you want to use leafpad you would write "sudo leafpad /etc/fstab").

2). Open a new terminal and type in "sudo blkid". This will give you the UUID of the hard drive that you want. You need to have an idea of which hard drive you want to auto mount, which is why labelling it when it was formatted is a good idea.

3). You can now edit the fstab line. You can use this:

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UUID=b09f4464-9313-44b5-befe-29f488244b4e	/media/Disgo	jfs	defaults	0	0

But replace the UUID with your own (from Blkid), the name of the hard drive with your own (ie. if you wanted to mount a hard drive called "Bill" change "/media/Disgo" to "/media/Bill") and finally change the file type to your file type. My Disgo is jfs, but if you have an NTFS for example, change jfs to NTFS.

Now that i've changed it, this is quite simple. It is much easier than using Disks or NTFS-Config (which only works for NTFS formatted drives).

[fumbles22]

Ah! Just when I thought I had it figured out, i've encountered a problem.

My hard drive mounts automatically, but I can't seem to copy and paste anything to it.

If I right click on it in a Thunar window and click "open as root" I can then paste things onto it.

How do I change my fstab so it mounts itself as root on startup?

[WharfRat]

Ah! Just when I thought I had it figured out, i've encountered a problem.

My hard drive mounts automatically, but I can't seem to copy and paste anything to it.

If I right click on it in a Thunar window and click "open as root" I can then paste things onto it.

How do I change my fstab so it mounts itself as root on startup?

You might not be the owner of the file system.

What does this return with the partition mounted.

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ls -ld  /media/Disgo

[fumbles22]

Sorry for the late reply, but I managed to figure this out again. It involved a frantic google search, which is the theme of this entire thread!

It turned out that the problem was the one you described: namely that I didn't "own" the drive so I didn't have read and write privileges with it. I solved this by typing:

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sudo chmod 777 /media/Disgo

...or something like that.

The "777" means that everyone who uses the computer has read and write privileges. Since i'm the only person using the computer, this is fine. However, if I were to share the computer with someone else, I might have to change that. Some other forums were talking about using "755" and other numbers like that.

It took me quite some time to figure out because I thought I had to edit the fstab file again. I now realise that there's a difference between mounting a drive, and setting who can use it.