I’ve got a number of external USB hard drives connected to my ubuntu server that need to mount to a predictable directory.

When you log into Gnome, the desktop environment does it’s nifty thing and mounts any drive you’ve got plugged in — but if the box reboots, the drives won’t be mounted until the next person logs into the computer.

I needed something that happens at boot time to do this task.

There’s a superuser post that asks this question, but none of the answers were helpful. The highest-rated post relies on a command that doesn’t exist.

So first off, make sure your external drives have a label. The label will be the name of the directory that is the mount point. To edit the label, go to “System > Administration > Disk Utility”, find the drive, unmount it, and click “Edit filesystem label.”

Then, as root, edit your /etc/rc.local and add these lines:

for dev in $(ls -1 /dev/disk/by-label/* | grep -v EFI) ; do
  label=$(basename $dev)
  mkdir -p /media/$label
  $(mount | grep -q /media/$label) || mount $dev /media/$label
done

All done!

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