I recently discovered a good way to automount an external hard drive to my server. Automounting basically is the mounting of the drive when the system starts up. Pretty self explanatory. Once it’s mounted it’s good to go until the system is restarted. The issue I was having with my external hard drive as it wasn’t mounting automatically. I was manually mounting it after the system was up. Which really sucks having to do that each time the server is rebooted. The first solution I tried was usbmount. Usbmount seems to be the go to solutuion for most people. For some reason I couldn’t get that to work. It would properly install it but then would not automount the drive at all. Then I ran into a solution that works great called fstab. In order to get it to work I added the following configuration to the /etc/fstab file. Then saved and exited the file.

/dev/sdb1 /media/usb auto utf8 0 0

Now on reboot it’s able to auto mount my external hard drive without any issues.