I’m running a Ubuntu server on my old laptop with an external HDD connected to it. The external HDD is powered independently from the laptop, as it is plugged into the wall.
During a power outage, my laptop remains operational due to its battery, but the HDD shuts down. When power is restored, my laptop does not automatically remount the HDD, and I have to reboot the system manually to access it.
Does anyone know how I can resolve this issue?
This is correct. I made my drive auto mount using /etc/fstab, and I believe that is only checked once during boot.
You can run mount -a to mount all fstab entries. You could put that in a cronjob I guess
If I were to make it run that command every 5 minutes, would there be any downsides?
I don’t know if it has side effects when there’s issues with mounting or the like.
It would also interfere if you want to unmount it and forget to disable the cronjob.
Nah, that’s good. What I mean is, if it’s in /etc/fstab, it should be possible to manually mount it without a reboot. Have you tried manually remounting it after power comes back?
Nope, I haven’t tried that. But I will give it a try when the next power outage occurs. I actually didn’t know I could manually remount until today. I’m still pretty new to selfhosting.
Gotcha. Yeah, the stuff in fstab is just a convenience; it’s equivalent to running a bunch of mount commands at boot. You might be able to just run “mount” again without the '-o remount" option. I was just listing that in case you were seeing some kind of errors in trying to manually mount it.