The automount question was on my mind during a neighborhood party, so it came up in conversation when a neighbor mentioned he was into Ubuntu. Long story short, he recommended a GUI application called “NTFS-Config” and this web tutorial:
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/automount_ntfs.html
Hot dog! It worked.
During this episode I learned that Mint *used* to automount drives as its default but stopped doing that. Users in the Mint forum don’t seem happy about this change.
Also I learned that the control of the automount function is inside the file “/etc/fstab” which you can edit manually — if you know the syntax. The NTFS-Config GUI application adds the correct lines to the fstab file.
Automounting a drive in Linux also requires a “mount point”, which NTFS-Config creates. This created a new “path” to my Thunderbird mail files, which meant that I needed to re-Browse to my mail folders on my Windows “C:” drive (which is my “sda1” drive in Mint).
All is now working fine.
By the way, to complete the story of my automount journey, I need to mention two solutions I tried that did *not* work:
“pysdm” seems to have a dedicated following, but it did not work for me. The fields I needed to change were grayed out.
“mountmanager” held a lot of promise, with it’s nice GUI interface and many options settings. Maybe I didn’t check the right boxes.
As mentioned above, “ntfs-config” worked like a charm. It let me set all my drives to automount on boot, and also to mount with Write permissions. If, after installing ntfs-config it does not work, follow the instructions on this page and it will work in Mint:
http://www.noobslab.com/2011/12/install-ntfs-configuration-tool-and.html
Windows users never deal with disk mounting. Linux users should not have to either. Windows = 1, Linux = 0.
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