I had a problem: every time my Windows have a big update, it locks a specific partition that I use to share files between Windows and Linux. After the update, I wasn't able to boot Linux again, as fstab could not mount it.
To avoid using a pen drive or booting any other way just to get my Linux working again, I removed the partition from fstab.
It worked, but I didn't want to manually mount it on every boot. Worst than that: Dropbox app synchronize on that partition. It means that on every single boot it raised an error message that my files were moved. It was definitely not a good way to solve it.
My new solution: create a script to mount the partition and run it at boot. Any error here would not stop my Linux from booting and I would still have it working by the time I logged in after boot. But, where is the best place to run a root script at startup? Of course, systemd! A simple service running a script should do the trick.
Well, with a simple search I found out something even better: systemd can mount partitions using systemd.mount!
To keep it simple, I am going to explain, step by step, the basic usage of systemd.mount with only the options I used myself.
1. Create a .mount file on /etc/systemd/system/ (I will get back at this point later, for now, just use any name for the file)
2. Inside the file you should specify the following attributes:
3. Now comes the tricky part: you have to name your .mount file accordingly with your Where= statement. So to mount it on /run/media/bruno/Multimedia you have to name it run-media-bruno-Multimedia.mount
4. It's time to test it:
$ systemctl daemon-reload
$ systemctl start run-media-bruno-Multimedia.mount
To check the unit status, you can run systemctl status run-media-bruno-Multimedia.mount
If everything is working fine, just enable it: systemctl enable run-media-bruno-Multimedia.mount and you are good to go.
/etc/systemd/system/run-media-bruno-Multimedia.mount
[Unit]
Description=Mount Multimedia out of fstab
[Mount]
What=/dev/disk/by-label/Multimedia
Where=/run/media/bruno/Multimedia
Type=ntfs
Options=defaults
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Just a description of you .mount script.
The partition itself. You can specify it by name, path or UUID.
Examples:
The easiest one after description: the file type of the partition. If you are trying to mount a Windows partition, it will probably be ntfs. If it is a Linux partition, it will probably be ext4.
Partition options, the same used on fstab.
I used multi-user.target to start in multi-user runlevel.