I'm new to Linux, switched from Windows last month. By following a "How To" video on YouTube I've succeeded in moving my /home directory to a separate nvme drive from the OS. Now I have a massive music collection that's currently stored on external hard drives.
I've been trying to link the music folder within /home to a separate ssd but all my attempts have failed.
-I tried following the same steps as moving the /home directory but substituting /home/paul/Music. Total failure, caused system instability & reboot issues.
I tried mounting the drive & the folder together ( mount /home/paul/Music /dev/sda1 ) that worked until I rebooted the system. Then I ended up with an unmounted drive full of music & an empty folder in my home directory.
Surely there's a way to do this. If anyone knows how, explaining it to me in "Idiot terms" would be greatly appreciated. As I'm not that good with the Terminal yet.
Thanks
You were pretty close. The way to do it is registering the external SSD so that your system knows how and where to mount it. To mount a drive means to make it available to the filesystem at a specific location. The manual way only works until the next reboot, hence why you need to make an entry for this to be permanent.
Here's another thread where you can read more about how to do this:
If you want to do it through the command line, you need to edit the file at /etc/fstab (you'll need admin privileges) and add an entry that looks something like this:
You can identify and obtain the relevant details about the drive you want to mount by running the blkid and lsblk commands. The two key details are the UUID and the filesystem type.
In the code snippet above, you would change the first and third fields to match that of the drive you are trying to mount. The second field is where would you like to see the files for this drive.
In your case, that should be /home/zenzen/Music ā changing the username accordingly.
Zenzen,
Thanks for your assistance but there's been a slight misunderstanding. I have no trouble at all mounting external hard drives. The system does that automatically as soon as I plug the drive in.
The drive I've been trying to mount to the folder is an internal drive.
But from your post, I'm surmising I need to take the following steps. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I mount the drive to the folder as I did on my second attempt.
Then I need to modify the line in the fstab to make the mount permanent?
By basically making the same additions to the fstab as I did when I moved my /home directory. But with the appropriate info for the relevant drive & folder?
The only difference between an internal and an external drive is how soon the system will detect them, but you still need to create an entry inside the /etc/fstab configuration file describing what should happen when that happens, so the steps are the same.
You can mount manually first to make sure that everything works as expected. Use the command: mount /dev/sda1 /home/zenzen/Music (device first, then the mountpoint). And then update the configuration file accordingly, and reboot to test it works properly.
Remember that on the /etc/fstab file you need to specify the filesystem of the drive which you can get by running blkid (the TYPE option). The UUID is not required but it's best to use that instead of the device name, since this can change between reboots even though is less likely to happen when it's an internal drive, as the boot sequence would probably recognize the drives in the same order everytime. Just something to consider.
Thanks for your assistance Zenzen. But once again my system crashed after trying to add extra internal drives to folders within /home.
For the last month I've been fighting this OS while trying to achieve what I had in Windows 7 fifteen years ago.
Zorin is a good looking OS & performed well on my 6 year old laptop (Lenovo Idea pad) but it just would not perform the way I want it to on a newly built desktop. {Ryzen 7 5700G on a MSI B550 a Pro motherboard).
I don't blame the OS as the motherboard only supports Windows. When I can afford to buy a new motherboard to replace this one, I'll be back. In the meantime hey Windows, I'm back.
If you are giving up on Zorin you might want to try MX Linux. They have a version with AHS (advanced hardware support). They also have developers that are very active on the forum. And they have QSI which is quick system info. With it you make a snapshot of your complete system with hardware and driver info and then paste it into your post. Then the devs can see exactly what your system has and why it might not be working like you want it to.
Zorin and this friendly forum got me away from Windoze permanently but some of the things I needed to do I just couldn't with Zorin. So I started trying other distros. The great thing about Linux is the option to try a variety of operating systems until you find the one that works best for you.
A good Alternative could be Linux Mint. The new Version 22 offers a newer Kernel that Zorin at this Point not have. Maybe it runs more stable with Your Hardware.
I'm back.
I re-installed Zorin & it seems to be more stable now. But I haven't done anything that caused the instability in the past.
I've moved my /home directory to a second m.2 drive & all is good.
I'm trying a different approach to adding the extra drives this time. I made sub-folders in /mnt & mounted the drives to those sub folders. I followed Zenzen's advice & used UUID's in the fstab.
I then created symlinks from the folders to my desktop.
Now I have another problem, I don't have permission to use the folders & it won't let modify the permissions using chmod 777.
What am I doing wrong?