How to automount a drive in Linux the GUI way with GNOME
How to automount a drive in Linux the GUI way with GNOME
‘ZDNET Recommends’: What exactly does it mean?
ZDNET’s recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing.
When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers.
ZDNET’s editorial team writes on behalf of you, our reader. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards. If we have made an error or published misleading information, we will correct or clarify the article. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form.
How to automount a drive in Linux the GUI way with GNOME
Tim Kitchen/Getty Images
First things first. Automounting is an important step in Linux because it makes it such that when you reboot your machine, those attached drives are automatically mounted. That way you don’t have to worry about doing it manually.
This is important because you might have applications (such as backups) that save files to those drives. Should an application attempt to write to a drive that’s not mounted, it will fail. In addition, if you use secondary (or tertiary) drives for file storage, you’ll want to have them automatically mounted for convenience.
Also: The best Linux laptops
Although setting up an automount from the command line is not all that challenging, it’s not nearly as easy as doing so from a GUI. And that’s exactly what I’m going to show you. Once you’ve taken care of this, your secondary drives (be they internal or external) will automatically mount to the location you define.
Let’s get to the steps.
How to automount a drive on the GNOME desktop
What you’ll need: The only things you’ll need are a running instance of Linux with the GNOME desktop environment and a secondary drive attached. That’s it.
1. Create a folder
The first thing to do is create a new folder to serve as the mount point. Open the GNOME file manager and navigate to the folder you want to house the mount point (you can even place this in your home directory if you like).
Also: Ubuntu Cinnamon makes switching from Windows to Linux as painless as possible
Right-click a blank spot and select New Folder. When prompted, give the folder a name and click Create.
Creating a new folder in the GNOME Files app.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
2. Attach the drive
Next, attached the drive to the desktop machine. If you’ve already attached the drive, you’re ready for the next step.
3. Open Disks
Open the Applications Overview, type disks. Once the Disks icon appears, click to open GNOME Disks.
4. Access the mount options for the drive
Select the drive to be mounted in the left pane and then click the right-pointing arrow (to the right of the black square).
Also: The most important reason you should be using Linux at home
Then, select Edit Mount Options.
Access the drive mount options here.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
5. Configure the mount options
In the resulting window, make sure the User Session Defaults is in the Off position, and configure the drive as such:
- Mount Options: Enable Mount at System Startup and (optionally) you can enable Show in User Interface. If there are no entries in the final text field of Mount Options, it should read nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show.
- Mount Point: This is the folder you just created. For example, if you created FLASH in your home directory, that would be /home/USER/FLASH (Where USER is your username).
When you’re finished, click OK. You’ll be prompted for your user password.
Also: 8 things you can do with Linux that you can’t do with MacOS or Windows
Upon successfully typing the password, the mount options will be saved.
Configuring the automounting of an external drive.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
6. Take ownership
The final step is to take ownership of the drive (so you save and edit files on the drive). To do that, go back to the main Disks window and make sure the new drive is selected. Click the right-pointing arrow in the box and then click Take Ownership. You’ll be prompted for your user password again. When you successfully type the password, you then have ownership of the drive, so you now have both read and write access.
You must take ownership of the drive, otherwise you can’t write files or edit existing files within.
Screenshot by Jack Wallen/ZDNET
When you reboot the machine, it will be automatically mounted in the same folder. And that’s all there is to configuring an automounted drive on the GNOME desktop.
Add a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.