Mounting USB on boot causes error on boot

Question

I am attempting to mount a usb drive to a specific directory at boot time so that it's mapped to the same directory each time. I read this article, Automounting USB drive on boot, that says to add it to /etc/fstab

proc            /proc           proc    defaults          0       0
PARTUUID=bf444af9-01  /boot           vfat    defaults          0       2
PARTUUID=bf444af9-02  /               ext4    defaults,noatime  0       1
UUID=b994a97c-027d-465e-8483-ad519866f87c /mnt/usb2 ext4 defaults,umask=000 0 0
# a swapfile is not a swap partition, no line here
#   use  dphys-swapfile swap[on|off]  for that

I tried both PARTUUID and UUID, same results both times.

Here's what I've tried:

PARTUUID=b994a97c-027d-465e-8483-ad519866f87c /mnt/usb2 ext4 defaults,umask=000 0 0
PARTUUID=fc69e031-8593-4c67-9cf9-c364d0166117 /mnt/usb2 ext4 defaults,umask=000 0 0
UUID=b994a97c-027d-465e-8483-ad519866f87c /mnt/usb2 ext4 defaults,umask=000 0 0
UUID=fc69e031-8593-4c67-9cf9-c364d0166117 /mnt/usb2 ext4 defaults,umask=000 0 0

When I restart, it is giving this error:

Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked.

I got out of this by modifying the cmdline.txt and adding bash.

I did a blkid to see my usb drive UUID. Here is what I got:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo blkid
/dev/mmcblk0p1: LABEL_FATBOOT="boot" LABEL="boot" UUID="6284-658D" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="bf444af9-01"
/dev/mmcblk0p2: LABEL="rootfs" UUID="3a324232-335f-4617-84c3-d4889840dc93" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="bf444af9-02"
/dev/sda2: UUID="b994a97c-027d-465e-8483-ad519866f87c" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="Basic data partition" PARTUUID="fc69e031-8593-4c67-9cf9-c364d0166117"
/dev/mmcblk0: PTUUID="bf444af9" PTTYPE="dos"
/dev/sda1: PARTLABEL="Microsoft reserved partition" PARTUUID="4792d598-bd1e-4784-99a5-27db1f5d937b"

What am I doing wrong? I cannot get this usb drive to mount at boot up to a specific directory.

Any suggestions please?

Answer 1

I feel the article you followed is not a particularly good one.

The following /etc/fstab entry always works for me:

LABEL=PASSPORT2TB /mnt/Passport2TB ext4 rw,user,nofail 0 0

Of course you will need to substitute the LABEL that identifies your USB drive, and create a mount point that suits you better than /mnt/Passport2TB. If your drive is formatted in something other than ext4, change that to match.

If you want to edit the LABEL for your USB drive, there are several ways to do this:

1. plug it into your Mac/Windows/Linux PC, and change it w/ the GUI

2. you can also use the CLI with a procedure similar to this

Why use LABEL instead of UUID? How many drives are you mounting on an RPi? Do you really need 32 hex characters (2³⁶ bits) to keep up with all your disk drives? Which is easier to remember? Have you read the section Indicating the device and filesystem in man mount?

You have chosen /mnt/usb2 as your mount point. That should work, but have you also created the folder/dir you'll use for a mount point? Using the example above:

$ mkdir /mnt/Passport2TB

After you've done all of this, it's time to test:

$ sudo mount -av

All should be well. Now, if you want to experiment with other options (defaults, umask), edit the line you just inserted in /etc/fstab to add one of them. Then umount the USB drive, and run sudo mount -av again. Repeat as necessary until you've got it right.

If you're still having problems, run the command lsblk --fs, and post that instead of blkid results. Why use lsblk instead of blkid? If you actually read man blkid you'll see this passage:

Note that blkid reads information directly from devices and for non-root users it returns cached unverified information. It is better to use lsblk --fs to get a user-friendly overview of filesystems and devices. lsblk(8) is also easy to use in scripts. blkid is mostly designed for system services and to test libblkid functionality.

Answer 2

You could simply add the bash command a bash executable and place it in /etc/init.d

such as:

#!/bin/bash
sudo mount foo /dev/foo_bar