Problem with automount

[rednose]

Hi all,

My system has few internal HDDs and I started to have issues with one. After I rebooted PC one day, I realised HDD is now mounted under different folder in /media/<user>, which screwed up some apps.

Used to be /media/user/UUID, now it is /media/user/UUID1

Checked the obvious -- original folder has right permissions and is accessible, HDD itself is OK, I can manually mount it under old directory.
Now, this HDD is not mounted through /etc/fstab, but is automounted. I can, of course, just add entry in /etc/fstab and disable automounting of this drive, but would like to fix it properly.

Where does automount keeps information about drives and mount points? I did not find it in /home or /etc

Thanks,
Rudolf

[jlittle]

I suggest you check out system settings, removable storage. There's options there.

But, more generally, if a partition has a label, that will be used for auto-mounts, unless you tell the system otherwise. If there's no label, the "system", (maybe "udisks", which uses "udev", getting somewhat subsumed into "systemd" I think) casts about for a name to use. I'm not surprised the name is not stable; different file systems have different types of ids, and full UUIDs are for computers, not humans, IMO; I dislike them. The "KDE Partition Manager" on the "System" menu can set the label, through Partition, Properties.

[oshunluvr]

IMO, as a matter of stability and to avoid problems like this, one should not rely on automount for internal fixed devices. That's precisely what fstab is for. Especially if you have applications relying on the mount existing. Using automount it that situation is a really a bad idea. But it's your system so...

As far the UUID change? Not possible unless you manually changed it or recreated (formatted) the file system - then it would change unless you explicitly, manually set a UUID.

I agree with jlittle, if you're not going to use fstab and are in the habit of reformatting partitions, you should probably start using labels when you format. IMO, if you need the mounts to run some applications don't rely on automount.

The only reasons I can think of to not have an internal file system not in fstab is to decrease boot time or to keep some file system "safe" from some other operation. In both those cases, a more reliable method would be to create an fstab entry with "noauto" and "user" options. This would have the effect of not mounting at boot, but allow your user to mount them, reliably, by either a manual mount command, via a script, or (I believe) using Dolphin by clicking on the file system location. The fstab entry would insure the file system would mount at the same location every time.