Hello, last night on a whim, I pulled the cord and finally am making a push to use Linux exclusively. I am not the most knowledgeable when it comes to Linux but I can hold my own enough.
EXCEPT when it comes to mounting drives and making them work with programs. I’ve gotten them wiped and mounted, but steam does not see them as internal drives and at each reboot, they or any games I put on there are gone from steam. They also do not show up with their names I’ve given them during formatting.
Would adding them to fstab fix some of these issues? I know they would at least be mounted before I ever open steam. So maybe there is a chance?
For more info, these are two Samsung 800 series SSD drives. One 250 GB, and the other 500 GB. These are games only SSDs as it’s their only job.
I am on elementary OS version 7.
Any help will be very much appreciated. Thanks for anyone who takes the time to respond.
Just some tip: if you’re not comfortable editing
/etc/fstabdirectly, usegnome-disk-utilityapp to edit mount options from GUI.Can gnome-disk-utility set up permanent mounts? I’ve used it for other things before, but I’ve never used it to permanently mount a drive. If so, I wish I knew about that sooner.
Yes, if you check the “mount at system startup” checkbox, it’ll update fstab for you. My only problem was when deleting partitions on gnome-disk-utility, it doesn’t automatically delete the fstab entries it previously created. You’ll need to manually clean it up yourself. This might cause mount problem if you delete and recreate the partition with the same mount settings because there are now two fstab entry, where the first entry references partition that no longer exist.
Good thing to be aware of. I usually edit fstab manually anyway, but this is worth knowing if I’m helping someone out.
I’ve gotten used to adding extra drives in fstab, myself. I do wish adding permanent secondary drives was a more straightforward process though. I understand the Windows approach of making them instantly accessible has security implications, but I feel like that’s something distros could implement as an optional setting.
I think little things like this hinder Linux adoption among end users. The purists may cry foul at this idea, but I think there should be more and better GUIs for system management tasks, so users don’t have to use the terminal or muck around editing text files as much.
EDIT: Apparently gnome-disk-utility might be a solution if you’re looking for something more straightforward than manually editing fstab. I don’t know whether it can do permanent mounts or not though.
EDIT2: Turns out gnome-disk-utility can create fstab entries, but it can’t remove them if you’ve used it to delete a partition.
If you want them mounted before you open steam then you should add them to fstab, it will become a condition for booting your machine.
ls -la /dev/disk/by-uuid/Make sure you mount with the UUID, the UUID is permanent on a disk, unlike /dev/sdx.
blkidWill also show you the mapping betwen UUID and disks.
So your fstab will look like this
UUID=7ca0dbbb-459d-4731-a3..... /boot ext4 defaults 1 2Test if the uuid is correct before booting by mounting it manually in a random location like /mnt with
mount /bootAnd see what happens.
it will become a condition for booting your machine.
Personally, this is what I want to avoid (particularly for slower drives, though I leave the HDD unmounted most of the time) because booting isn’t as fast as it should be already (mobo firmware), and I did see some info about passwordless mounting but it doesn’t seem to make post-boot startup commands work properly.
Though luckily nothing much actually needs this, if I forgot to mount the SSD and open Steam I just close it and do that (in the past sometimes I’ve had to re-start Steam twice for it to take effect).
