fstab not mounting a disk on boot

Question

I'm running Arch Linux on a Macbook. I want to automatically mount my Macintosh partition when booting Arch, so I added the following to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda2   /media/Machintosh hfsplus defaults 1 2

After rebooting, the partition was not mounted, but I could mount it with the following command:

sudo mount /dev/sda2

How can I make Arch Linux automatically mount the partition?

Answer 1

As you said above, creating the directory to attach the mount point to will fix this issue.

Answer 2

If hfsplus was built into the kernel as a module and if the partition containg the modules has not yet been mounted (read: entries in fstab have to be in the right order) the hfs-partition cannot be mounted during boot.

Might also happen if your kernel cannot autoload modules.

Answer 3

Creating the mount point fixed the issue:

mkdir /mnt/Machintosh

Also if you want to avoid warnings, mount the volume as read-only, because write is not supported on HFS+ journaled systems (or you can disable journaling, but it is not advised).

Answer 4

Some recommendations ,

It's likely /media will be cleared by HAL , so during boot , the path doesn't exist , so mount would fail.

You should either change the mount path , e.g to /mnt/Machintosh ,

Or use user-land tools , e.g udisks to mount it automatically (this will ensure the correct path , e.g /media/VOLUME_NAME)

To use udisks , add a mac.desktop in ~/.config/autostart ,

[Desktop Entry]
Exec=Mount Mac Disk
Name=udisks --mount /dev/XXX
Type=Application

(Note the second solution work only for graphical users)