There is no easy way to make a partition automatically mount on boot

[Evan Nelson]

Mounting a 2nd partition is easy -- just open it from the "Places" window. However, making a partition automatically mount on boot is much harder than it should be. The only two ways (I can find) to make it happen is to either manually edit /etc/fstab or by adding a mount command to the startup programs list. Both of these solutions are unintuitive and far too complicated for most users.

Editing /etc/fstab is too difficult because it requires the user to:
-Know what /etc/fstab is, let alone where it is and how to edit it (and it requires root)
-Know the syntax for a line in /etc/fstab
-Know the device name for the partition (/dev/sdb1? /dev/sdb2? /dev/sdc1?)

Adding a mount command to startup programs is too difficult because it requires the user to:
-Know the syntax for mount
-Know the device name for the partition (/dev/sdb1? /dev/sdb2? /dev/sdc1?)
-Manually create a folder in /media (which requires root) and give it the proper permissions (which it won't have by default)

Making a partition boot on startup should be as simple as:
1) Right-click on a mounted partition and click "Properties"
2) In the properties window click on a check box somewhere that says "Mount on startup".

[Chris Wilson (notgary-deactivatedaccount)]

Thanks a lot for reporting this, however in order for a bug to be considered a papercut it must be encountered by the average user during their day-to-day computing habits such as IMing, checking email and browsing the web. It is highly unlikely that these users will have more than a single partition on their disk. For more information on what constitutes a papercut, please see here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut

[Jack Leigh (leighman)]

Assigning to nautilus since this should presumably be the place to do it.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

its indeed one of the most annoying things for people in Ubuntu. though i think it might be possible to implement in palimpsest(gnome-disk-utility) nautilus is a little unrelated maybe.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Is the issue here that a disk volume present on boot is considered a fixed volume, whereas a post-boot inserted disk volume considered a transient one, owned by the logged-in foreground user?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Chris Wilson (notgary-deactivatedaccount)]

Reopening as part of a review of closed paper cuts.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

That's a job for the disks utility rather than the file browser

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

Further to comment #7 I'm belatedly closing the Papercuts task as "Won't Fix". Any request for such functionality should be raised in an upstream bug report as a "Wishlist" against the appropriate project or package. Any successful request will in due course find its way into Ubuntu.