How to mount a 2nd hdd

English Hardware
1

Greetings.
I don’t know a lot about permissions or how to set them but here goes…
I have a newly installed Leap 15.6.
I added a 2nd HDD.
Problem:
I have to type my root password upon boot to make the 2nd HDD accessible.
The message requesting the password says the HDD is /dev/sda1
I’m root and I’m the only user.
Is there an easy way to avoid the root password prompt and have it automatically available for me to use in my default account?
Thanks in advance.

2

File systems (not HDDs or how you prefer to call them) to be mounted at boot are to be defined in /etc/fstab

I have no idea how you created the file system on /dev/sda1, or even how you created the partition where it is on, but e.g. the YaST partitioner offers you to create the mount point and to create the /etc/fstab entry.

Ia am not sure what you mean with this, but when it is literally true, I will quit from this topic.

3

Thank you, I’ll see what I can find in Yast partitioner or Gparted.
I had installed my new Leap, then plugged in my 2nd HDD onto the SATA port on my motherboard as permanent data storage. Upon boot, I am prompted to log into /dev/sda1.
Sorry for the confustion.
I meant to say that I am both the root administrator and the general user. Nobody else logs in, so there aren’t others who would need access to the HDD.
The HDD is newly formatted (The whole thing) to NTFS.

4

When the file system is NTFS, you should be aware of the fact that as a non-Linux file system it does not support file ownership (by user and group), nor the famous permissions. These elements are faked on mount. Thus you should either set them correct for the use you want to allow in the /etc/fstab entry.

BTW, to be pedantic, it is not “the whole thing” (the mass-strage device) you put an NTFS file system on, it is only the sda1 partition you used for it.

1 Like
5

  1. So, this is an existing NTFS partition, because it has an active Windows OS living there??

  2. Or it’s ONLY a freshly formatted, completely blank NTFS partition??

If yes to #2 … why use NTFS - a non-native Linux filesystem??

6

Thank you for the reply myswtest.

  1. The primary purpose of my 2TB 2nd drive is a backup of my external 2TB USB HDD.
    It’s a 2nd backup of every bit of my computing life.
    No windows there, except for a Win 10 install .iso file.

  2. I was about to begin copying the backup files until I read your question here.
    It got me re-thinking this.
    I believe a Linux based filesystem makes more sense. I’ll reformat to ext4.
    Yes, a completely empty file-free formatted 2TB HDD for backup purposes.

My NTFS reasoning:
I must keep a Win machine dedicated for my high end 3D graphics program that will not run in Linux either in Wine or VirtualBox, so I keep a lot of backed up proprietary files from a program that only runs in Windows.
I also keep backup files for my wife’s Windows machine.

Because of that, I believed it best to back up on a partition both systems can access.
But thank you, I think a Linux based partition would be better. :slight_smile:

7

Thanks for the clarification. And yea, NTFS makes sense, considering that drive is mainly used by one or two Windows machines, for backup purposes.

If you’re using your Linux machine to access the NTFS data (files, etc) in mostly “read-only” mode, that’s fine.

My initial thinking was “why creating an all NTFS formatted drive to be used with a Linux only machine?”.

If you’re going to access that drive rarely using Linux, nothing wrong with NTFS.

We have one laptop here that only has Win10 (no duel boot with Linux) with NTFS. We only use that laptop for “Windows reasons”. We never access it with a Linux machine. And have an external 4tb USB drive that is NTFS for backups.

And we have some Linux machines (desktops and laptop) that are “Linux only”. And we have an external USB backup drive only for the Linux machines.

8

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