Make external hard drive accessible to all users

[Bill Davidsen]

Pasha R wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 12:02 AM, Veli-Pekka Kestilä <fedora at guagua.fi> wrote:
>> On 13.7.2012 23:39, Rick Stevens wrote:
>>>
>>> On 07/13/2012 01:25 PM, Pasha R issued this missive::
>>>>
>>>> F17 introduced a change to how external drives are mounted. They are
>>>> mounted now exclusively to a logged on user. This is somewhat
>>>> inconvenient, because iso images stored on external drive is now
>>>> inaccessible to virtual machines. Is it possible to make drives
>>>> accessible to everyone?
>>>
>>>
>>> Add the mount to /etc/fstab and make sure the "auto" option is included.
>>> Something like:
>>>
>>>      /path/to/device    /mountpoint    ext4      defaults,auto 0 0
>>>
>> I would use UUID as the device identifier so that if device name changes it
>> will still mount it correctly.
>>
>> blkid /dev/sda1 will get you the uuid and then add:
>>
>> UUID=YOUR-UID         /mountpoint    ext4      defaults,auto     0 0
>>
>
> If I understand correctly, this implies that device should be
> available at boot time, which is not always the case, since it is
> external USB drive.
>
Many of us on this list suffer from literalism, meaning we think what you said 
is what you meant. Had you said "removable" rather than "external" it might have 
helped people understand your problem.

In any case, for extN filesystems if you provide a label (tune2fs if you didn't 
create one) it seems to get mounted on /media/label nicely. Don't know for sure 
about MS filesystems, but given that my new USB drives always have the same name 
no matter where I plug them in, I suspect the ugly string is a label of some 
kind, and you could use that, perhaps even change it to something you like better.

Once you get it mounted in the same place every time, you can use symlinks if 
you don't like the name.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot