Prevent mounting a partition in fstab

Question

So I feel really bad for asking this question because it looks like it has been asked a million times on the internet. I am even finding a very consistent answer, and I am not getting any errors when I try the solution I found, but it is still not working.

Here is the issue. I have an ntfs partition on an external hard drive that I do not want to mount on startup (sound like a freaking common problem or what?).

I have found this question asked all over the internet, and the single answer that comes back pretty much unanimously is I should be using the "noauto" option in fstab for the device. Even the man pages for fstab states:

"noauto do not mount when "mount -a" is given (e.g., at boot time)"

Sounds like that is what I want right?! Well I am using that option and the drive is still mounted by the time I log into my account.

Here are my fstab entries for the 2 partitions that are on the same external drive:

#External 2TB drive
UUID=8598c4fc-171a-4324-a4d3-06145d12ceba /media/Storage   ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       2
#Windows compatability partition on external drive does not need to be mounted.
UUID=751E843A54B3D902 /media/Windows\040Compatability     ntfs    noauto     0        0

I am at a total loss for why the noauto option is not working like I expect it to, but when I start up my pc the drive is available and mounted at the location specified (/media/Windows Compatability). I tried changing the options (like user/nouser) and those behaved as expected. Just the noauto is completely baffling me.

Thanks for any help.

B.

PS: If you are curious about the use case, there is a 2TB ext4 partition on the drive, and then a small ntfs partition on it. The point of the ntfs is to carry some windows tools for reading ext4 when I have to use my drive on a strange machine.

Answer 1

Why don't you just comment the line in fstab to disable it on boot?

#UUID=751E843A54B3D902 /media/Windows\040Compatability     ntfs    noauto     0        0

You should still be able to mount he partition simply with nautilus whenever you need it.

Answer 2

If the disk is mounted by udev, try to add a file 81-hide-my-disk.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d with the content:

ENV{ID_FS_UUID}=="751E843A54B3D902", ENV{UDISKS_PRESENTATION_HIDE}:="1"

(strange UUID, by the way).

By the way, i think you probably need to reload udev rules after the change:

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

Original source is on Unix-Linux SE.

I checked the language in the (current in 13.10) /lib/udev/rules.d/80-udisks.rules and it seems that it is still the same.