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My internal Samsung 970 EVO 500 GB drive contains my OS. I have two Crucial internal solid-state drives that contain files, and have defined symlinks so that I can get to them from ~/Documents. I've set up the options, using Gnome Disks, to mount those drives at startup. Despite this, I've noticed Gnome Disks doesn't put entries for those drives in /etc/fstab.

When I boot, certain programs - like InSync, which I use to sync files to Google Drive -- cannot find the Crucial drives. Also, my symlinks show as archived files when I look at them in the terminal. To get the symlinks active, I have to navigate to the drives in Nautilus. Once I navigate to the drives in Nautilus, the symlinks show up as live in the terminal and my programs like InSync can be restarted and have no difficulty finding the drives.

What's going on here? Why isn't Gnome Disks updating /etc/fstab, and how do I get my drives to be recognized upon startup? Again, Gnome Disks is set up with the option to mount at startup checked, for all drives.

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  • Hey @Dan Green, just realised you wanted Symbolic Links as opposed to drive maps. I've added an answer on mounting the drives manually. Let me know if this doesn't suit your requirement.
    – DankyNanky
    Apr 18, 2020 at 15:18

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The easiest way to fix this is to just mount them in your /etc/fstab as you see fit. To perform this, open up the terminal using ctrl + alt + t and follow along:

Issue blkid to get the UUID of the drive you want to map:

sudo blkid
/dev/nvme0n1p1: UUID="cf426a4a-efcb-4fdf-8d5b-16c351b6120f" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="Backups" PARTUUID="33ff5cc6-8195-4fe9-a3bb-64f842972bfc"

From here, I need to grab my UUID and append this to my fstab file as such (note: these are 'defaults', you can append these with the options you want):

sudo nano /etc/fstab

For me, I made a directory under /mnt/Backups and wanted to mount there:

# Backups SSD:
UUID=cf426a4a-efcb-4fdf-8d5b-16c351b6120f       /mnt/Backups    ext4    defaults,auto   0       0

Doing this, my drive is auto-mounted and can be accessed via /mnt/Backups as required:

╰─$ df /mnt/Backups 
Filesystem     1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme0n1p1 491209736 297953008 168235032  64% /mnt/Backups

You can also use the chmod and chown command to set the permissions as you see fit. More help can be found here

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  • I noticed fstab doesn't have labels for the partition. I don't know whether the referring programs need the labels or not....is there an option for ext4 filesystem to specify the label in /etc/fstab, or does Gnome somehow take care of that?
    – Dan Green
    Apr 18, 2020 at 15:56
  • for example, if blkid yields /dev/sda1: LABEL="Files" UUID="eebdacc5-8701-4b9d-b256-0ba5f9074db7" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="Files" PARTUUID="515a684f-acf5-4ee5-9083-2fa8194ea515" it seems to me the /etc/fstab entry should be UUID=eebdacc5-8701-4b9d-b256-0ba5f9074db7 /mnt/eebdacc5-8701-4b9d-b256-0ba5f9074db7 ext4 nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0 ....or should the mount point be /mnt/dan/Files, which is where gnome disks says it is mounted?
    – Dan Green
    Apr 18, 2020 at 16:00
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    or can I use both LABEL"xxx" UUID="xxx" in my fstab entry?
    – Dan Green
    Apr 18, 2020 at 16:08
  • Hey @DanGreen - you're mounting the drive to a friendly file, so you could do something like: UUID=$yourid /home/dan/Documents/drive ext4 ... and then you just use /home/dan/Documents/drive to access the HDD.
    – DankyNanky
    Apr 18, 2020 at 16:08
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    So, from my UNIX days, /mnt was generally used for removeable media, network filesystems, or loopbacks. /mnt is where samba mounts, for example. Everything permanent-looking mounted somewhere else. Thanks...you answered the question.
    – Dan Green
    Apr 18, 2020 at 17:04

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