Gemini-Website/gmi-files/blog/partitions-systemd.gmi
2021-02-02 20:13:47 -03:00

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# Mounting partitions with systemd
I had a problem: every time my Windows have a big update, it locks a specific partition that I use to share files between Windows and Linux. After the update, I wasn't able to boot Linux again, as fstab could not mount it.
To avoid using a pen drive or booting any other way just to get my Linux working again, I removed the partition from fstab.
It worked, but I didn't want to manually mount it on every boot. Worst than that: Dropbox app synchronize on that partition. It means that on every single boot it raised an error message that my files were moved. It was definitely not a good way to solve it.
My new solution: create a script to mount the partition and run it at boot. Any error here would not stop my Linux from booting and I would still have it working by the time I logged in after boot. But, where is the best place to run a root script at startup? Of course, systemd! A simple service running a script should do the trick.
Well, with a simple search I found out something even better: systemd can mount partitions using systemd.mount!
## How to mount a partition with systemd
To keep it simple, I am going to explain, step by step, the basic usage of systemd.mount with only the options I used myself.
1. Create a .mount file on /etc/systemd/system/ (I will get back at this point later, for now, just use any name for the file)
2. Inside the file you should specify the following attributes:
* Description= A description of your mount script
* What= The partition that will be mounted
* Where= Directory where the partition will be mounted
* Type= The partition file type (ext4, ntfs, fat32 etc)
* Options= Mount options
* WantedBy= or RequiredBy= Unit dependencies. It's used by the enable and disable commands of the systemctl
3. Now comes the tricky part: you have to name your .mount file accordingly with your Where= statement. So to mount it on /run/media/bruno/Multimedia you have to name it run-media-bruno-Multimedia.mount
4. It's time to test it:
```
$ systemctl daemon-reload
$ systemctl start run-media-bruno-Multimedia.mount
```
To check the unit status, you can run systemctl status run-media-bruno-Multimedia.mount
If everything is working fine, just enable it: systemctl enable run-media-bruno-Multimedia.mount and you are good to go.
## My mount script
```
/etc/systemd/system/run-media-bruno-Multimedia.mount
[Unit]
Description=Mount Multimedia out of fstab
[Mount]
What=/dev/disk/by-label/Multimedia
Where=/run/media/bruno/Multimedia
Type=ntfs
Options=defaults
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
```
## Explaining the attributes
### Description=
Just a description of you .mount script.
### What=
The partition itself. You can specify it by name, path or UUID.
Examples:
* /dev/sdb2
* /dev/disk/by-label/Multimedia
* /dev/disk/by-uuid/bcebcc2e-3a07-48d8-bd3c-e4eaf98fafc5
### Type=
The easiest one after description: the file type of the partition. If you are trying to mount a Windows partition, it will probably be ntfs. If it is a Linux partition, it will probably be ext4.
### Options=
Partition options, the same used on fstab.
### WantedBy=
I used multi-user.target to start in multi-user runlevel.
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