SDB:Mount additional disk

Some professional users have desktop or laptop computers with multiple hard drive or solid state disks. This article help you to mount additional disks anywhere you want and accese data easier.

Tested on openSUSE

• Tumbleweed
• Leap 42.2
• Leap 42.1

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Introduction

If your computer has multiple disks:

• A(/dev/sda): a super fast SSD for system (/) and user data (/home)
• B(/dev/sdb): a slower, older SSD, you still want to use (one single XFS partition)
• C(/dev/sdc): a 2TB HDD for all your old files (one single XFS partition)

When you install openSUSE on disk A, partitions on disk B and C will not be mounted when system starts. This means you have to manually mount each disk before accessing data inside. When you click disk name on file manager (Dolphin or Nautilus), and type root password, the disk will be mounted in a long path, like /run/media/jimmy/7d423ba2-96bf-4493-acf9-ed22e897eed5/

This is not very convenient. We might want:

• Disk B and C will be automatically mounted when system boot
• Disk B and C will be mounted at /home/jimmy/SSD1 and /home/jimmy/HHD1
• Do not require root password every time

Next section, we will achieve this in several simple steps.

Steps

Step 1: find UUID of your disks

In Dolphin or Nautilus file manager, click and mount your additional disk partitions. In address bar, you can find mount path like:

/run/media/jimmy/7d423ba2-96bf-4493-acf9-ed22e897eed5/

7d423ba2-96bf-4493-acf9-ed22e897eed5 is the UUID of the disk partition we need in next step.

Setp 2: edit /etc/fstab

sudo vi /etc/fstab

Then add a new line at the end of file:

UUID=7d423ba2-96bf-4493-acf9-ed22e897eed5 /home/jimmy/SSD1 xfs defaults 1 2

1. 7d423ba2-96bf-4493-acf9-ed22e897eed5 - your actual disk partition UUID.
2. /home/jimmy/SSD1 - where you want to mount the partition
3. xfs - file system of the partition
4. defaults - read and write options, do not need to change
5. 1 - if it should be dumped, do not need to change
6. 2 - the order of file system check, do not need to change

Step 3: mount partition and test

sudo mkdir /home/jimmy/SSD1
sudo mount /home/jimmy/SSD1
sudo chown jimmy:users /home/jimmy/SSD1

Open file manager, try copy or move files in new mount point /home/jimmy/SSD1

If this succeeded, try to mount other disk partitions.

FAQ

How could I change mount point?

First, unmount current mount point:

sudo umount /home/jimmy/SSD1

Second, edit /etc/fstab and set new mount point:

sudo vi /etc/fstab

UUID=7d423ba2-96bf-4493-acf9-ed22e897eed5 /home/jimmy/data xfs defaults 1 2

Third, mount again:

sudo mkdir /home/jimmy/data
sudo mount /home/jimmy/data
sudo chown jimmy:users /home/jimmy/data

How to unmount and uninstall disk?

sudo umount /home/jimmy/data
sudo rmdir /home/jimmy/data

Helpful links

• Correct way to mount a hard drive, Stack Exchange