How to set up automatic disk mounting in Linux

All settings are shown on the example of a CentOS system and are applicable to any Linux distribution.

Mount by drive name

Open the following file for editing:

nano  /etc/fstab

and add the following line to it:

/dev/sda1 /db xfs defaults 0 0

/dev/sda1 – the drive that we are mounting

/db – directory where we mount the disk

xfs – file system

defaults – standard options.

0 0 – the first disables the creation of backups using the dump utility, the second disables the disk check.

Now we create a directory in which we mount the disk (in this example, /db):

mkdir /db

And we manually mount the disk to check if the fstab settings are correct:

mount /db

A new disk should appear. This can be checked with the following command:

mount

Mount by ID

This method is not much different from mounting by disk name – instead of a name, we specify an identifier. This approach is considered more reliable, since when reconnecting drives to other ports on the motherboard, the priority and, as a result, the device name may change – this can lead to mounting problems. The UUID of the disk does not change and therefore, this problem does not matter with this mount.

So, we look at the disk identifier with the command:

blkid

We’ll get a response like this:

/dev/sdb: UUID="3e53fc7e-a417-4fa5-b034-b227bea2474c" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda1: UUID="358f032e-3efb-42ab-b3ba-05ddc82fedfd" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="xfs" PARTUUID="0beca126-01"

*Let’s say the drive we want to mount is sda1. Its ID is 358f032e-3efb-42ab-b3ba-05ddc82fedfd.

Open the following file for editing:

nano /etc/fstab

and add the following line to it:

UUID=358f032e-3efb-42ab-b3ba-05ddc82fedfd /db xfs defaults 0 0

Mounting can be checked with the command:

mount -a

Example of mounting a network drive

//192.168.0.1/network /mnt cifs user,rw,noauto,credentials=/root/.smbclient 0 0

in this example, the network shared folder on the server with IP address 192.168.0.1 is mounted to the /mnt directory. cifs (SMB protocol: samba server or Windows shared folder) is used as the network file system. Connection parameters – user: allows any user to mount, rw: with read and write access, noauto: do not mount automatically at system startup, credentials: a file that contains the login and password for connecting to the shared folder.

Now let’s create an authentication file (credentials):

nano /root/.smbclient

and bring it to the following form:

username=automationtools
password=automationtools

*username: username, password: password. Of course, in your case, your data is indicated.

Now enter the following command:

mount /mnt

The network folder //192.168.0.1/network should be mounted. This can be checked with the following command:

mount