automounting a USB hard drive

[Alvin]

On Tuesday 10 November 2009 15:55:41 pkaplan1 at comcast.net wrote:
> Running karmic kde, fresh install, fully updated (w/ udev 147~.6.1)
> 
> I have an external usb hard drive with one ntfs and four ext3 partitions.
> Under both Jaunty and Karmic, the drive is found at /dev/sdb1 to
> /dev/sdb5. Under Jaunty the all the partitions automounted at launch with
> the following /etc/fstab entries:
> 
> UUID=5af75fba-045b-41c1-ae54-f7c5bc133694 /media/jupiter ext3 relatime 0 2
> UUID=27655aac-f0fc-40df-9ba1-8412d584b5c5 /media/mars ext3 relatime 0 2
> UUID=08c89a6f-7c9c-4f59-b26d-e43921450ad9 /media/mercury ext3 relatime 0 2
> UUID=a21074d2-7e57-4676-aeda-c80b560d9c68 /media/saturn ext3 relatime 0 2
> UUID=1968-2E97 /media/venus vfat utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
> UUID=B4BCCC8FBCCC4E14 /windows ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
> 
> However, under Karmic, I have to manually issue sudo mount -a to get the
> partitions to mount; they won't automount at boot.
> 
> How can i get them to automount?
> Paul

(Please, do not send HTML mail!)

There is nothing wrong with your fstab entries.
It could be a bug. I found this one (jaunty):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/util-linux/+bug/367782

On the other hand, all twelve of my karmic installations show boot problems 
too. Mounting after the boot process always works. I see two symtoms:
- root drive can sometimes not be found (rebooting a few times helps)
- NFS drives are not mounted during boot. (mount -a afterwards is OK)
- Booting from USB stick will use the wrong /dev/sdX and has to be manually 
altered in grub. (I hear that installing on USB stick is unsupported, so this 
one does not really count.)

I hear people complaining about logical volumes coming up a while after 
booting, but I have not experienced this myself. All those problems might be 
related.

(Karmic sure boots faster, but not really reliable)