How do I persistently mount an ext HDD in OS X?

October 31, 2008 8:11 PM

How do I set up OS X (10.4) to mount an external hard drive at a specific folder on startup?

I've tried putting @reboot mount /dev/disk1s1 /my/mountpoint into root's crontab, but that didn't work. There wasn't any output produced, even with "mount -v", and the HDD wasn't mounted.

I've heard mention of NetInfo Manager, and I see where "mounts" may be specified, but I don't know how to set it up.

Is there a way to get it so that when I restart my computer, the external hard drive shows up mounted at /my/mountpoint? FYI, I don't care about having the icon on the desktop.

posted by philomathoholic to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I think the correct way to do that on a Mac is to use launchd instead of crontab jobs. Try looking into that.

Another quick fix might be putting the script under /System/Library/StartupItems.
posted by the_dude at 9:04 PM on October 31, 2008

I fear that cron and inetd nolonger function under Mac OS X, you must learn the format for the appropriate .plist files under /System/Library/LaunchDaemons or /System/Library/StartupItems, but they are not difficult. Oh, why doesn't it mount the disk automatically?
posted by jeffburdges at 9:40 PM on October 31, 2008

Response by poster: Oh, I forgot to mention, setting it up in fstab and running mount -a doesn't work either, and still without any output/errors.

It'll mount automatically, but I was hoping for a more controlled method.
posted by philomathoholic at 10:16 PM on October 31, 2008

setting it up in fstab and running mount -a doesn't work either, and still without any output/errors

As a Linux user looking over the BSD fence I'd kind of assume that fstab is the right way to do this. Can you show us your complete fstab, including the line for /dev/disk1s1? Also, can you find anything in your system logs that shows your other filesystems being mounted at boot time, and if so, does anything pertaining to /dev/disk1s1 appear nearby?
posted by flabdablet at 10:46 PM on October 31, 2008

MacOS X Hints: Change a disk's mount point .

This may cause all sorts of freakout if you upgrade to Leopard.
posted by nathan_teske at 11:20 PM on October 31, 2008 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Here's my entire fstab:

UUID=3A45D2BE-A273-3DFA-B508-B33C9AC4D79E /Users/juke hfs rw,auto 1 2

I know it's not like Linux or the BSDs, in that it doesn't really use the fstab file, but I thought there might still be a way.

That Hints page looked promising, but it didn't work. It still didn't mount until I logged in, and it mounts at /Volumes.

If I was going to look through log files, which ones would I look through?


My if-all-else-fails strategy is to use some symlinks to mimic a mount point. But, the problem with this is that the owner/group is set to philo/philo and chown/chgrp exit successfully without changing anything. I'd prefer it to be the "jukebox" user. I could set everything to be world readable and writable, but I'd rather not.
posted by philomathoholic at 1:39 AM on November 1, 2008