Automount NTFS partition with EFI/GPT

Question

I have a multiboot laptop with EFI and GPTs. One drive is a shared drive formatted with NTFS.

I was going to automount it at boot by modifying bits in /etc/fstab. However:

# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>

# / was on /dev/sda10 during installation
UUID=e9a74962-203b-4616-9d87-a4ef6bd6bbd3 /    ext4    errors=remount-ro    0    1

# /boot/efi was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=C2C9-8440  /boot/efi    vfat    defaults    0    1

# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=f3fa0a1b-174f-4459-80af-f1710947ab33 none    swap    sw    0    0

/dev/sr0    /media/cdrom0    udf,iso9660 user,noauto    0    0

This system has 4 OS'es on different partitions in addition to the DVD and shared partition. So things don't look quite right to me.

How does one go about automounting a shared NTFS drive on an EFI/GPT system?

Answer 1

There's nothing unusual or unique about EFI or GPT in this respect; you do it in exactly the same way you'd do it if your computer were BIOS-based and used MBR. In either case and broadly speaking, you have two options:

• Allow the auto-mounter to do it -- Most modern desktop-oriented Linux distributions include auto-mounters that will mount discovered disks and partitions, typically to somewhere in /media. To use this option, you need only double-click a disk icon on your desktop.
• Edit /etc/fstab -- You can add an entry for the NTFS partition to /etc/fstab. It should look something like your /boot/efi entry, but you'll need to change certain values:
  • The first column will need to uniquely identify the NTFS volume via a "UUID" (really a serial number) entry or by partition number (as in /dev/sda4 or whatever it is). You can use blkid to find the "UUID" value.
  • The second column should specify whatever empty directory you want to use as a mount point.
  • The filesystem type code in the third column should be ntfs-3g, IIRC.
  • The final character should probably be 0, not 1. (This specifies whether or not to check the disk for errors on startup. There are no good NTFS disk-check tools for Linux, though, so there's not much point in running such a tool on NTFS.)