Mounting data HDDs automatically when booting

Support & Help Requests Hardware
#1

I have 3 HDDs in my PC: A small (160Gb) disks for OS and software only. Also 2 disks dedicated to various kinds of data. Both disks are 1Tb in size and SATA connections, have been named and are in the ‘Places’ menu. The only difference is that one disk ist formatted to ext4, while the other is formatted NTFS.

Firstly, I would like to now if it is possible to mount these disks automatically when I boot.

Secondly, there is a curious situation (to me) when I select the disks from the ‘Places’ menu:

The NTFS disks will just mount and display the disk icon on the desktop.

Selecting the ext4 disk will load Caja first and display : ‘/media/… is a directory’ ( in a red bar across the screen). Closing the Caja window results in the disk having been mounted normally.
So, it works OK, but goes through that annoying Caja step. I have not been able to work out how to adjust any settings to avoid that and would welcome any comments.

Thanks
PS Ubuntu-Mate 16.04 64bit AMD

#2

Hi @zylmurbafi, Yes it is possible. There are many write-ups how to do this like this one: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab

The Caja system is there because mounting filesystems using /etc/fstab is not very user friendly. I invite someone with a better link to please jump in.

I’m not sure what that red message is saying. Posting a screen capture could help solve this mystery. Or re-creating the Bookmark may help.

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#3

Don’t know if it’s the “best” way, but what I usually do is create a mount point(s) in /mnt/, then open gnome-disk-utility and change the mount options for whatever partition(s).

sudo mkdir /mnt/whateveyouwannacallit
sudo chmod 777 /mnt/whateveyouwannacallit

Disks>highlight partition>gear icon>edit mount options. The options are fairly self-explanatory.

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#4

Thanks, grenouille
This was the simlest and completely effective suggestion. Many thanks.

#5

Thanks, Bill_MI
The suggestion from grenouille was very simple and appears to work just the way I want.
Because the HDDs are now mounting on boot, the annoying Caja message no longer appears when I had to launch each drive manually from ‘Places’.

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#6

Hi
As I said before grenoille's advice worked peerfectly.
However, I just now wanted to add anothe HDD but I cannot find anywhere the reference to:
Disks>highlight partition>gear icon>edit mount options which, of coursed existed last year.
There is no "Disk" at System>Preferences>Hardware which I remeber it to have been.

Is this perhaps an error on 16.04.6 , Kernel Linux 4.4.0-142-generic x86_64, MATE 1.12.1 now,

or have I lost my way altogether.
Anyway, any help is very much appreciated

Franz