Several months ago, I added two portable hard disk drives to my Lubuntu PC for data backup. One has the storage capacity of 1 TB and another is 2 TB. Lubuntu mounts them automatically with the name of Transcend and Transcend1, respectively.

The auto-mounting was great but the meaningless naming was absolutely not. I always got confused about which one was which when I was checking data in these two HDDs, but I had put the issue off until now.

Recently I revisited i3wm, a brilliant tiling window manager for GNU/Linux and BSD. I had tried it several years ago but didn’t keep using it with forgotten reasons. Anyway I picked it back and found it won’t mount my two external HDDs automatically.

That’s a real problem for me and this time I decided to solve it permanently.

So the situation was: I have to rename these two HDDs with meaningful names and then enable the auto-mounting using fstab so that everything will be alright after system booting.

The following steps were done with the default Lubuntu 18.04 window manager, which always auto-mounts the HDDs. After all the setting steps, I switched to i3wm and everything worked as expected.

Check the Information of the HDDs

Before changing the HDDs' labels (i.e., names), we need to check their status and relevant information which might be necessary in later steps.

Here are some commands I found really useful: df -h, sudo blkid, and findmnt.

List the mounted HDDs' status by using df -h:

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sde1       932G   47G  886G   5% /media/<your-user-name>/Transcend
/dev/sdd1       1.9T  213G  1.7T  12% /media/<your-user-name>/Transcend1

From the list we can make sure that the 1 TB HDD is /dev/sde1 and it has been mounted as Transcend and so on.

Then use sudo blkid to view the labels and the UUID of the two HDDs:

$ sudo blkid
/dev/sdd1: LABEL="Transcend" UUID="3AB2AB5AB2AB1981" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="4b1007b2-01"
/dev/sde1: LABEL="Transcend" UUID="86AEB68EAEB67671" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="707e033e-01"

No wonder my Lubuntu auto-labelling them as Transcend and Transcend1, respectively. They have the same default labels after all.

Every time I tried to write the mounting settings in /etc/fstab, I had a hard time to know the OPTIONS of my mounting targets. ~~Fortunately, this time Lubuntu has auto-mounted my two HDDs and I can use findmnt to view the settings:~~

$ findmnt /media/<your-user-name>/Transcend
TARGET               SOURCE    FSTYPE  OPTIONS
/media/<your-user-name>/Transcend /dev/sde1 fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096
$ findmnt /media/<your-user-name>/Transcend1
TARGET                SOURCE    FSTYPE  OPTIONS
/media/<your-user-name>/Transcend1 /dev/sdd1 fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096

~~The OPTIONS listed above will be copied and pasted to /etc/fstab later. (Note that the lables in the TARGET column hasn’t been renamed.)~~ (This time I found a solution, which is listed below in the /etc/fstab code block.)

Change the Labels of the HDDs

Some goolging/duckduckgoing results suggest that I can change the HDDs' labels by using GParted or do it in Windows. These solutions seem easy, but I want to do it in my Linux system via simple commands.

AFAIK, there are some commands which can rename the HDD’s label for us. For ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem we have e2label and tune2fs. In my case, however, using them causes error:

$ sudo e2label /dev/sde1 "transcend_1T"
e2label: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sde1
/dev/sde1 contains a ntfs file system labelled 'Transcend'

Because my HDDs are in the format of ntfs, which need another tool named ntfslabel. The command I used is as follows:

sudo ntfslabel -f /dev/sde1 "transcend_1T"
sudo ntfslabel -f /dev/sdd1 "transcend_2T"

Note: I don’t remember when and how I installed ntfslabel. If you have no ntfslabel, I guess (based on the man page of ntfslabel) it is avaiable via installing ntfs-3g.

After renaming the labels, reboot the system and then check them by using df -h.

Write the settings into fstab

The final step is to add the following lines to /etc/fstab:

# Transcend portable hard drives
UUID=86AEB68EAEB67671   /media/<your-user-name>/transcend_1T/  ntfs  rw,auto,nofail,user,fmask=133,dmask=022,uid=1000,gid=1000  0   0
UUID=3AB2AB5AB2AB1981   /media/<your-user-name>/transcend_2T/  ntfs  rw,auto,nofail,user,fmask=133,dmask=022,uid=1000,gid=1000  0   0

The options are copied from here.

Reboot the system and switch to i3wm, I finally have the two external HDDs auto-mounted with customized labels. 🎉

Edit [2020-02-27]: Add nofail option in /etc/fstab to let the booting prcedure skip the unplugged disk, or the system cannot boot properly.