Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

After installing Ubuntu 14.04, my second drive would not mount until I clicked on it. This was a problem for Dropbox and Copy, two applications that needed to access that drive on startup.

Initially, I typed these lines:

sudo mkdir /media/wd1tb
sudo chown username:username /media/wd1tb

And I edited my fstab with this code.

UUID=xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx /media/wd1tb ext4 defaults 0 0

That didn’t work. I don’t know why, but it didn’t.

Finally, I received some advice to use the UUID of the drive instead of my own name for the mount folder. The advice also instructed me to insert my username in the path to the mount point.

So I typed this.

sudo mkdir /media/username/xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx
sudo chown username:username /media/username/xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx

Naturally, the username is my username and the xxx in the example are the real numbers of the drive.

Then I added the following to the end of my fstab file.

UUID=xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx /media/username/xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx ext4 defaults 0 0

I don’t know why, but that fixed it. I no longer need to click the drive to get it to mount.