236
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
236 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
83666 readers
1101 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Since all of the “Linux is easy” folk are here I’ll ask a question even though I’m not near my PC:
I’m dual booting W11 and ZorinOS, I have 3 drives and only the OS drive mounts at boot. The other 2, games SSD and a storage HDD, have to mounted manually. An online search yielded that this was “expected behaviour” and “how it’s designed to work” but unfortunately it confuses Steam each time I boot because as far as Steam is concerned the drive ceases to exist.
Has anyone else had the same issue? I think I could use crontab to mount the drives at boot but it seems like something that shouldn’t be happening at all.
Not sure what you searched for to get those answers, all I had to search was "Linux mount at boot" to get this answer with directions for editing /etc/fstab or using the gnome disk utility gui based on your preference
Not sure, but I’ll give that a go this weekend when I have some time to play around with it. Many thanks!
It's absolutely bananas that internal drives are not mounted automatically by standard. It's even more bananas that it's not easily customizable via GUI. Gnomes partitioning app can somewhat do it I believe, in KDE's partitioning app, it was completely broken last time I tried. Either way I lost two people back to Windows because of this
Yeah its not a perfect system, has some flaws, but its actual freedom from surveillance and late stage capitalism on the plus side.
Not bad for a free, modern desktop that looks stunning.
While I do agree with you on principle, keep in mind that while NTFS is technically supported in Linux there can still be issues. Reading is fine, but write can still be suspect. Someone a lot more experienced than I can correct this if I'm wrong, but it is not recommended to share a drive actively between Windows and Linux due to NTFS quirks.
I mount my Windows NTFS data disk as needed in CachyOS, and will build the NAS I keep putting off for active file sharing as I spend more time on the Linux partition.
Yeah NTFS is not a great experience indeed. You can only do so much without it being open source. But I also experienced issues with mounting ext4 or btrfs. It's not a dealbreaker for me, but it tends to irritate new users while it seems easy to fix.
Very true, not a user friendly experience at all. My only experience with setting up automatic mounting was looking into mounting my "user drive" (separate SSD that I redirect all Windows stock folder structure like Documents or Downloads to) into at the time Manjaro, and abandoning the idea after reading about NTFS write concerns and experiencing chkdsk actions in Windows every time I even just mounted it. All my ext4 or btrfs drives were created during Linux installation and mapped automatically.
Admittedly in CachyOS now I have yet to generate a chkdsk after mounting, browsing or copying data out of my NTFS user drive, so that may have been a Manjaro thing (along with breaking either itself or the bootloader ever single update). Still not risking the drive by auto mounting it or writing to it.
this was the only confusing thing I found withWheb I started using Linux, but once I got my drive mounting at boot at startup.
I don't have any problem with doing it anymore but why don't beginner friendly distros have like a gui version or something easier to do that with for new users?
The hard part is knowing exactly what language to search to get the result you want.
I had to figure this out the hard way because everywhere I asked the question I'd get told how I was wrong and it's good actually. So good luck finding anything helpful for your specific install. I will share with you some links that kinda got me there. I had to figure out most of the steps individually and piece them together from multiple sources.
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/mounting-permanently-a-storage-unit-in-fedora-kde-automount-at-boot-no-password-all-users-can-see-and-edit-files/148030/15?replies_to_post_number=16
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eoq_cgAWMmQ
https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/auto-mounting-secondary-drives/970
I'm sure sure how relevant those links will be as I was trying to do the same on bazzite and not zorin but hopefully they help. If you are able to install gnome disks (if you haven't already) there is a checkbox to do it for you but I forget where it is. I have a little document typed up on my PC at home that I can share with you as well when I get there later on the off chance that it is helpful. If you have questions, ask away I'm not sure I will be helpful but I'll do what I can.
FYI, linux seems to hate NTFS partitions and that may be a contributing factor here.