What’s the best way to auto mount a usb drive or hard disk? What if the filesystem is ntfs? If you want to (permanently) mount a hard disk or usb drive to your debian based system, keep on reading!

To get a list of connected usb disks you can:

sudo blkid

In the screenshot above you can see there are two usb devices:

• /dev/sda1: UUID=”E89484EA9484BC96″ TYPE=”ntfs” PARTUUID=”008ffb75-01″
• /dev/sdb1: LABEL=”Extern station” UUID=”92FA278AFA2769A5″ TYPE=”ntfs” PARTUUID=” 0009a8db-01″

To be able to use these devices, you have to mount them in a folder. Let’s create two folders:

sudo mkdir /mnt/usb1
sudo mkdir /mnt/hd1

The usb1 folder I’ve created for my usb stick. The hd1 folder for my external hard drive.

We need to take ownership of these folders:

sudo chown -R pi:pi /mnt/usb1
sudo chown -R pi:pi /mnt/hd1

If any of the usb devices is formatted in ntfs, you best install ntfs-3g:

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

You best test if mounting is successful, this is the easy way:

sudo mount -o uid=pi -o gid=pi -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/hd1

I once had a problem with ntfs-3g that was solved by updating everything:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get rpi-update
rpi-update

sudo nano /etc/fstab

As you can see in the screenshot above I’ve used the disk UUID as name to find it. This way, if you unplug your usb flash drive and put it in another usb port, it still works. As type, make sure to use ntfs-3g.

Now you just need to reboot and the disks are both mounted!

sudo reboot

Sources

• http://posts.danharper.me/raspberry-pi-2-auto-mount-usb/