Mount drive on boot

Date: July 8th 2016
Last updated: July 8th 2016

I am mounting a 16 GB USB drive to the head node which will eventually house the data directory of a MySQL database. This is generally not recommended because of the risks associated with loosing the data. However, I am doing this on a test platform so I don't mind if something goes wrong and I have to start from scratch (which will be downloading another sample database - no big deal).

Setup

1. plug in the usb stick
2. identify media (along with several other checks)

   lsusb #check connected devices
   du -sh #total disk usage
   df -hT /home #check home disk usage
   df -h #check device summary
   free -h #check device memory
   w #who's using the system (cpu load)
   cat /proc/version #system version
   cat /proc/cpuinfo # cpu info
   lscpu #cpu info
   vcgencmd measure_temp #check core temp
   df --help # more info
   

3. create mount location

   mkdir /mnt/usb
   

4. provide user permissions

   sudo chown -R pi:pi /mnt/usb
   

5. mount the drive

   sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb -o uid=pi, gid=pi
   

6. To mount on boot, add this line to /etc/fstab

   /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb auto defaults,user 0 1