Troubleshooting • Re: fstab not mounting external HDD when on boot or when drive connected

Any ideas?

Yes, but first:

• You don't need to include auto in your mount options. It part of defaults
• You almost certainly don't want users in your mount options. users allows any logged in user to mount and unmount a partition. It might make sense when you are hotswapping drives or have drives with removable media (even then user is a better choice) but it makes no sense when using a USB device as a fixed drive.
• fstab does not, never has, and likely never will mount drives on hotswap insertion.* If you need that functionality, use teh desktop's automounter (but that ignores every partition listed in fstab) or install and configure a suitable package from apt.
• mount's error messages often aren't very helpful.

Now...

I can think of three possible causes for it not mounting during boot and/or with sudo mount -a:

1. Insufficient power. Assuming you're using the recommended, official PSU for the Pi model you have the upper limit on all models prior to the Pi 5 is a total of 1.2A/6W. On the Pi 5 it's 1.6A/8W but that drops to 600mA/3W if USB PD negotiatiopn fails. In all cases that is shared between all connected bus powered USB devices.
2. Your drive or USB/SATA bridge adapter is using a Jmicron chipset. Many of those are know to not play nicely with Linux.
3. You need to force a longer timeout for device detection and/or mounting.

I'm not going into further detail here as much of this is covered in my guide (Using fstab A Beginner's Guide). You could do a lot worse than giving it a read (but I'm biased)

*: Technically fstab doesn't mount anything during boot either. Systemd reads it and attempts any auto** mounts.
**: Which includes any using the default options.

Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Sat Dec 30, 2023 1:21 am

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