Abhinav Rawat

Abhinav Rawat

In love with Electronics

Persistent Mounts

1 minute read

After installing your linux distro, though you’ll be able to access your Windows/NTFS partitions easily, things can get annoying sometimes with you having to mount the partition manually everytime. Here I describe how to get away with this mess by automatically mounting partitions on boot.

You could also do the same from Unity using the Disks utility, but here I describe the so called hard way. The way we do it is by editing the /etc/fstab file. This file gets executed everytime you boot up your system. We just instruct this file to also mount our desired partitions apart from what it normally does.

Get the UUID

Before modifying fstab, we need the UUID of the partition which acts as a unique identifier for the partition to be mounted. To show a list of available partitions and their UUID, use

$ sudo blkid -o list

and you’ll get an output similar to this:

device       fs_type label      mount point       UUID
------------------------------------------------------------------
/dev/sda1    ntfs    WINRE      (not mounted)     ACEAEE02EAEDC8A2
/dev/sda2    vfat               /boot/efi         6E82-B10E
/dev/sda4    ntfs    Windows    (not mounted)     00A8EFDAA8EFCBEA
/dev/sda6    ntfs    Downloads  /media/downloads  5CFA5B52FA5B2792
/dev/sda10   ntfs    Documents  /media/documents  86585E63585E5253
/dev/sda11   ntfs    RECOVERY   (not mounted)     3E60EB0960EAC6AD

This should help you in deciding which partition to mount. If you’re still confused, you may use fdisk -l instead. This should give you the type of the partition listed as well so that you don’t accidentally damage an important partition.

Modify fstab

Once you get the UUID, you can now modify the fstab file as a root user and add an entry similar to the following at the end, ensuring that you change the UUID accordingly.

$ sudo nano /etc/fstab

<UUID>                  <mount point>           <type>  <options>   <dump>  <pass>

UUID=5CFA5B52FA5B2792	/media/downloads	ntfs-3g	rw,auto,user,exec,uid=1000         0	0

UUID=86585E63585E5253	/media/documents	ntfs-3g	rw,auto,user,exec,uid=1000         0	0

Once modified, save the file and run the mount command to re-execute the fstab file:

$ sudo mount -a

This should mount your new partition which would also be mounted automatically every time you boot up. Enjoy!