Oh, my old nemesis, mounting secondary drives under Linux. ( kbin.social )

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.

mrbigmouth502 ,
@mrbigmouth502@kbin.social avatar

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.

redcalcium ,

Just some tip: if you’re not comfortable editing /etc/fstab directly, use gnome-disk-utility app to edit mount options from GUI.

mrbigmouth502 ,
@mrbigmouth502@kbin.social avatar

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.

redcalcium ,

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.

mrbigmouth502 ,
@mrbigmouth502@kbin.social avatar

Good thing to be aware of. I usually edit fstab manually anyway, but this is worth knowing if I'm helping someone out.

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