Getting a SATA hard drive to mount at boot and sharing whole drive by SMB

[John Felstead]

Armbianmonitor:

https://paste.armbian.com/egugigomeh

Sorry for what should be help on a basic operation but I'm having real problems trying to share a SATA attached hard drive via SMB. My aim is to try and share the root of the whole 1Tb drive but I have two problems.

1) Getting the drive to mount at startup. (I thought internal and SATA drives did by default but this seems not to be the case

2) Creating a share with guest permissions.

I understand that I should edit the fstb file using the UUID of the disk. I obtained the UUID but there are two listed. One for the whole disk and one for the partition. (Note The hard drive was formatted exFat in windows before being attached as whatever i did i couldn't write to it, something to do with having root permissions. I even tried taking ownership but without success)

here is the blkid command output

/dev/sda1: LABEL="data" UUID="74E3-01BF" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="exfat" PARTUUID="6c2b2d10-01"
/dev/mmcblk0p1: LABEL="armbi_root" UUID="69fa8a60-c365-456c-8d0a-7889eb4a3713" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="c0cf2841-01"
/dev/zram1: LABEL="log2ram" UUID="7269c460-6283-4374-bcba-be885c806c25" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/zram0: UUID="7a1deaea-e26c-45f2-9a73-ac43c6bf301e" TYPE="swap"

 here is my fstb file

UUID=69fa8a60-c365-456c-8d0a-7889eb4a3713 / ext4 defaults,,commit=120,errors=remount-ro 0 1
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,nosuid 0 0
UUID=74E3-01BF /mnt/data exfat defaults 0 2

I used the disk UUID rather than the partition however the disk is no longer visible when armbian starts. previously it was visible but unmounted. there is an entry in the /mnt/ folder called data. I was also unsure if I should enter the filetype  exfat in the fstb entry as all other example show ext4 before defaults.

 

Please can someone put me right and suggest the correct entry in the smb.conf file. I believe it should be something like this :-

path = /media/kealy/data

available = yes

valid users = kealy

read only = no

browsable = yes

public = yes

writable = yes

 However as there is an entry in the /mnt/ folder should path be /mnt/kealy/data instead?

Finally where should the user password go in the smb.conf or is public= yes is this necessary. The device will only be used in a family household to upload their photos from their phones.

Edited 4 hours ago by John Felstead

[John Felstead]

OK I think I have learned something. My fstab entry doesn't contain an entry like x-gvfs-show  which i believe makes the disk appear in the UI (desktop icon and in Thunar??

I found this by comparing Gnome Disks settings for the SATA drive, which according to disks is mounted at mnt/data. Good.

So next task is to install and configure SMB to share the root drive on the network ideally without the necessity of entering a password.

 

So path should be /mnt/data?? and do I require Valid Users entry? Finally do I need smbpasswd.. Note users accessing will be from Windows 11 pcs and mobile phones (iOS)

 

path = /mnt/data

available = yes

valid users = kealy

read only = no

browsable = yes

public = yes

writable = yes