How can I mount a fat filesystem automatically as Ubuntu starts?

Question

I have a dual boot System with an Ubuntu-Filesystem a Windows Filesystem and another FAT Filesystem on my harddrive. My Thunderbird configuration is on that FAT partition. I tried different tools, but they are mounting the filesystem as root, so thunderbird cannot read and write on it. Sorry for my bad english and thanks for your answers.

Answer 1

Let us name your data partition as FAT for simplicity, and it's device name as /dev/sda11. Of course the actual partition Label and device name could be different.

You can check your device name and it's Label (If you set label, otherwise you will be given UUID of the device) with this command. Don't worry, if you see different UUID value for your system. Just open a terminal by Pressing Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut and type

sudo blkid | grep vfat

For my system, the output is like this,

/dev/sda11: LABEL="FAT" UUID="28D3-995A" TYPE="vfat" 

You can see, I've only one FAT partition whose Label is FAT and It's device name is /dev/sda11. The most important bit of information is this device name. After you have known the device name of your Fat partition, proceed as follows:

1. Open a terminal by Pressing Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut.

2. Type The below command

   gksu gedit /etc/fstab
   

   and hit Enter. This step will open /etc/fstab file in your gedit text editor. If you are using Kubuntu, replace "gedit" with kwrite. For Xubuntu and Lubuntu, use leafpad instead of gedit.

3. At the end of this file, Add the below line

   /dev/sda11  /media/Fat   vfat   defaults,rw,users,uid=1000,gid=1000  0    0
   

   My user id is 1000 and group id is 1000, so I added uid=1000 and gid=1000. Check what is your user id and group id and use them as the value of uid and gid.

   To Find your user id, type id -i your-user-name and to find your group id, type id -g your-user-name.

   After adding the line, save the file by Pressing Ctrl + S keyboard shortcut. Then exit the Text editor by Pressing Alt+F4. You can also use close

   Don't simply paste the line, replace /dev/sda11 with the actual device name of your FAT partition you found by executing sudo blkid | grep vfat command early in the answer

4. Then Again return to the terminal and type the below command

   sudo mkdir /media/Fat
   

   and hit Enter.

5. Restart your PC and see if your fat partition is correctly mounted.

Answer 2

Check out this link below

http://www.howtogeek.com/60817/how-to-auto-mount-partitions-at-linux-startup-the-easy-way/

there are multiple options which you can use.

hope this helps

Answer 3

Heres a guide for confusing fstab via command line for auto mount on boot. (Screenshots included)

http://ubuntuserverhelp.com/mounting-with-fstab/

Answer 4

To mount an NTFS partition at boot you need to modify the /etc/fstab file.

Use Disk Utility or the sudo blkid command to find out what is the name of the partition (sda?) then add a line to the fstab file.

Create a folder in the /media or /mnt folder (/media/Data in the following example) and add the corresponding line.

This is an example line for an NTFS partition:

/dev/sda4 /media/Data ntfs auto,rw,users,exec,nls=utf8,fmask=0022,umask=000,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

To modify the fstab you could press Alt+F2 and type gksudo gedit /etc/fstab. Save and reboot to test it worked.