Greetings - yet another new Zorin user, and somewhat-new Linux user. I used Linux many years ago with RedHat and Suse but now I'm trying to get back into it. Recently installed Zorin 17 Pro. On this laptop I have an internal SSD, around 250GB, and a second internal 1TB Samsung SSD, as well as one external 2TB Samsung SSD.
The issue, or what seems to be an issue is in Files under "Other Locations" all I see is Computer. I don't see the second internal drive. The external drive is mounted and accessible at the bottom of the left hand side.
However, if I go to Computer, then media, I see the contents of the second internal drive. This seems odd to me, as I expected the second internal drive to be mounted and accessible as a separate drive. As I came from Windows it is in NTFS format, as is the external drive.
Any suggestions? It would seem to me something isn't mounted right. lsblk -f returned with this:
One of the partitions from one drive (sda2) is mounted inside another drive (sdb1). While technically possible I can't think of any reason why you'd want to do this.
First, unmount the drives: sudo umount /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb1. And let's take a look at the output of cat /etc/fstab.
This is normal. It is mounted Media and therefor, accessed through that organized file tree.
I use the Nemo File Manager on Zorin OS, not Nautilus (the default file manager), so in my left pane, the additional drives are listed and accessible with One Click.
One option to adapt the desktop to your workflow may be to use a file manager that fits your workflow style.
Make sure you don't have the file manager accessing any of the files inside the drives. Same thing on the terminal, otherwise it will report it as in use and cannot be unmounted. Then you should be able to unmount the drives.
Now that I think of it, the unmounting the drives might have been because of the order since one of the partitions is inside another... Let's try one at the time:
sudo umount /dev/sdb1
sudo umount /dev/sda2
Assuming this works (verify again with lsblk that these drives are not mounted anywhere) you can now create separate directories for each drive.
Notice that the second command does not have spaces for the drive name. Space characters in file names are a frequent source of annoyances; better to avoid them.
By the way, you can pick whatever names you want for these I'm just using the names of the drives as they appeared in lsblk, again for better organization. Here's a screenshot of me be not following my own advice, just to prove that the name is not that important, and as an example of how it might look:
Then you can mount the drives each in its own directory:
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /media/<your_username>/SAMSUNG
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/<your_username>/T7_EXT1
At this point we might want to look into editing the /etc/fstabentry to ensure the drives always mount to the same directories. But let's see if this all works first.
Great! In theory that's how it should be mounted automatically so I'd just leave it for now. But if you want you can update the entry at /etc/fstab to enforce this. Add a line at the end that looks like this:
This is using my own external drive so you'll need to update the UUID, mount point and file system. To find out the UUID you can launch Disks, select the drive and the partition in question:
It's important to understand that this UUID corresponds to the file system i.e., one per partition, not the entire drive. Just something to consider when you have several partitions in the same drive. Also, if you reformat the drive or the partition at all this UUID will change and you'll have to update the /etc/fstab entry.
Again, this is not necessary as it should be done automatically. But if you notice that the drives are mounted in odd locations after rebooting at a later time, this would enforce the mount locations.
