Hard drive location keeps changing after upgrade to 13.04

Question

After I upgraded to 13.04 the hard drive media location keeps changing. These are installed hard drives not removable media. This issue does not seem to affect usability via the file managers (Nautilus and Dolphin) but it does affect symlinks.

In the following 'disk' represents the disk name and 'home' is my home directory name.

On one boot the media location is '/media/disk/' on another it's 'media/home/disk/'. There's no pattern that I've found so far as to when its one way or the other. The symlinks are written differently pending the mounting location. Some point to one location and other point to the other location. Their usability changes on rebooting where the ones that worked break and vise versa.

For example after I boot if I mount another drive it sometimes mounts at 'media/home/disk/'. If I mount another it mounts at 'media/disk/'. If I unmount the first that was at 'media/home/disk/' and remount that very same drive, it mounts at 'media/disk/'.

I was under the impression that internal hard drives ate supposed to be mounted at 'media/disk/' and removable media and disks at 'media/home/disk/'. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

So ultimately it seems that the underlying problem is where the drives are getting mounted. Then the question is where are they supposed to be mounted and why dosen't the system consistently mount them there?

I had a similar issue on upgrading to 12.10 but that seemed to be a bug and was resolved quickly.

Is this a bug or is it something I can fix permanently?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Since they're internal drives, it makes most sense to mount them statically. You can add lines to your /etc/fstab file in order to define your own mount point. See for example mine (I have two partitions apart from /, which I have mounted to /data/ and /media/Windows, for instance)

First, run sudo blkid, this will tell you the UUID for all drives attached to your system. Then add the following lines before the line #swap was on /dev/sdb5 during installation:

#Entry for /dev/sdc1
UUID=[UUID]    [mountpoint]    [type]    defaults    0    [pass]

where [UUID] is the number you found from blkid, [mountpoint] is a directory (you can create this wherever you want, possibly requiring sudo mkdir if in the root of the system); [type] is the filesystem in use (usually ext4 or ntfs), and [pass], from what I can gather, is best put as 2 for a secondary ext4 drive or 0 for an ntfs one (it has to do with how the filesystem checker, fsck, behaves with it - this could be false advice for ntfs, but for me at least it's trundled along quite nicely)

See here for further guidance: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MoveMountpointHowto

Hope this helps!