Mount drive at boot

Mount an external drive when the Raspberry Pi turns on. Usefule for a DIY NAS with samba.

I used an NTFS filesystem: it’s not the best to use with linux, but it supports file bigger than 4GB and is compatible with Windows (read/write) and MacOS (read-only, read/write with third-part tools like Tuxera NTFS).

TL;DR

To mount a ntfs partition /dev/sda1 in /mnt/usb at boot just exec my script and reboot the system.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/daquinoaldo/RaspberryPi/master/mount-drive-at-boot/mount-drive-at-boot.sh | sudo bash
sudo reboot

Important note

This script mounts a NTFS partition /dev/sda1 in /mnt/usb. If you need to mount another partition (i.e. /dev/sdb3) or with another filesystem (i.e. FAT32) download the script and change the bash commands to meet your needs or follow the instruction in the next section.

I don’t trust you, show me what to do

You’re right! Never trust random script found on internet!
Here is how to set up the Pi manually.

1. [optional] Install ntfs-3g for NTFS drive, you can skip if the drive has another filesystem

   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install -y ntfs-3g
   

2. Prepare the mount point. I chose /mnt/usb but you can change it. Usually is a subdirectory of /mnt or /media for convention.

   sudo mkdir /mnt/usb
   sudo chmod 1777 /mnt/usb
   

3. Edit fstab

   nano /etc/fstab
   

   and add this line

   /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb ntfs-3g defaults 0 0
   

   where /dev/sda1 is the partition to mount, /mnt/usb is the mount point previously created, and ntfs-3g is the filesystem (for NTFS, otherwise can be ext2, ext3, vfat for FAT32, exfat, etc.).

Important

The device may not boot if the drive isn’t connected. If you want to stop mount the drive at boot remove the last line (the one we added) from /etc/fstab.