Secondary storage drive not appearing in file manager

Framework Laptop 16 Linux
21

lsblk gets you information about block devices (disks and partitions). Take a look at an fstab entry:

UUID=a6c3b56a-3d2b-4cec-9f20-deab5af162bd / btrfs subvol=root,compress=zstd:1 0 0

The first column here is the device identifier, which is a UUID in this case.

Then the mount point, which is / and is the path that this filesystem will be mounted at

btrfs is the file system type

Then there are some mount options

The two numbers at the end are used by the dump and fsck commands. You can check out man fstab to read more about all this. (but you can also just use zero for both)

So, when you run `lsblk -o PATH,FSTYPE,UUID` it will show you the filesystem type and UUID for each block device. Since your new drive is /dev/nvme1n1p1, which is a PATH, you’ll find that line and then use the FSTYPE and UUID in your /etc/fstab

From there what do I do to get it to auto-mount without needing admin perms each time?

This is really Linux 101… Whatever mount thing that is asking you for a password is totally nonstandard and weird (probably an alternate systemd mount unit or something). But! the mounting will occur with elevated permissions. Filesystems that are in fstab are mounted as root without your intervention, though, so you still won’t enter a password at boot.

Normally, to make something mount at boot, you add it to /etc/fstab and that’s it. That is the file that is used to mount filesystems at boot. And it is what the Fedora installer (anaconda) did. As your generated file says, you should also run systemctl daemon-reload (probably as root) after editing the file in this case.

Also, I know Fedora and Ubuntu and even the Arch wrapper distros act like you don’t need to know anything to use Linux on the desktop, but it really is much better to know the basics! Every basic Linux book from O’Reilly is good and so is Linux for Dummies (my introduction to the topic way back in the 20th century)

22

Ok, so, I wan’t able to find a UUID for my new drive. Because two UUIDs were exactly the same. And when I tried to use the /dev/nvme1n1p1 in the lsblk command it said “unknown column”

Also is my /etc/fstab my generated file?

And yeah I should definitely know more lol

23

ok, I was able to find its UUID using lsblk -f

And I think the mountpoint too?

24

lsblk will show you where it’s currently mounted, but you can create any directory you want and use that as the mount point, if you’d rather have it at /mnt/data or/SteamLibrary instead of whatever it automatically got assigned

25

This is the part where I ask the obvious question of “How do I do that?”

Because like, do I just type that in instead of the current mountpoint or do I have to make it somewhere? Also I’ve tried to figure out the two numbers at the end of the command and I can’t manhandle the man command enough to go to the page where they’re held

Although so far, what I have written out in my fstab file is:

UUID=2c580f7b-40d5-4a7f-adda-7413faa0d09a run/media/enigma/2c580f7b-40d5-4a7f-adda-7413faa0d09a btrfs defaults 0 0

And I have no idea if that would work or immediately fuck everything up

26

You’re pretty close! run/media/enigma/2c580f7b-40d5-4a7f-adda-7413faa0d09a is missing the / at the beginning that represents the root filesystem.

But if you want to create a directory, you can do it in Dolphin or use the mkdir command. For my steam library example, you would run

sudo mkdir /SteamLibrary
sudo chown username /SteamLibrary

And then use /SteamLibrary in fstab where you have run/media/enigma/2c580f7b-40d5-4a7f-adda-7413faa0d09a

Also, as long as you’re just adding a line to the file, you can’t screw up too much. Just don’t touch the lines that are already there. But even if you screw that up, you could boot up a live USB, mount your filesystem, and fix the file from there.

27

fair enough, what do the last 2 numbers do. I know they have to do with file dumping and mount permission I think? But I can’t find any information about it online.

Also I think I got the directory made, did sudo mkdir /data and then the chown command

for some reason I couldn’t figure out how to make it in Dolphin, lol

28

From the manual:

The fifth field (fs_freq).
This field is used by dump(8) to determine which filesystems need
to be dumped. Defaults to zero (don’t dump) if not present.

The sixth field (fs_passno).
This field is used by fsck(8) to determine the order in which
filesystem checks are done at boot time. The root filesystem
should be specified with a fs_passno of 1. Other filesystems
should have a fs_passno of 2. Filesystems within a drive will be
checked sequentially, but filesystems on different drives will be
checked at the same time to utilize parallelism available in the
hardware. Defaults to zero (don’t check the filesystem) if not
present.