Jan 18
How-to: Mount a Network drive in Ubuntu
Recently, one of my roommates bought an external network drive, so everyone in the house can upload their music and movies. It’s hooked right into the network through the router so it’s easy for anyone to access– pretty cool stuff. It was pretty simple to setup in Windows, but it took a little bit of research for Ubuntu. Specifically, we have Maxtor “Shared Storage II” hard-drive, and I wanted it to auto-mount each time I reboot my computer. I figured it out using the tutorial here, but the basics are below.
- First you will need to install the “smbfs” package. This is what we will use to mount the drive.
sudo aptitude install smbfs
- We will also need a folder to mount the drive in. I used /media/public.
sudo mkdir /media/public
- Then, we need to edit /etc/fstab. This is where we add all the information needed to find and mount the drive. Open /etc/fstab using the command:
gksudo gedit /etc/fstab
At the end of the file add the following lines:
# Mount our network drive
//SERVER/SHARE /MOUNT-POINT smbfs guest 0 0Where “SERVER” is the name of your drive on the network. This can be either a name or IP address. For example, mine was “MAXTOR”. Replace “SHARE” with the folder in the drive you’d like to mount– mine was “Public”. “MOUNT-POINT” is the directory we created earlier, such as “/media/public”. The rest of the parameters have to do with permissions, and also where you can add advanced options. For more information on the advanced preferences, see
man mount.smbfs
- The final step is to tell the system to reload /etc/fstab and mount our drive. Do this with the command:
sudo mount -a
Then, you’re done! At this point you should be able to see the files in your drive with the command
ls /MOUNT-POINT
July 13th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Thanks the guide relay helped it was very easy to follow thanks, But to mount a drive with permissions on you will need to create a text file with just the following in it
username=yourusername
password=yourpassword
save it with a-name.smbcredentials and at the end of the line you add to etc/fstap on the line is
credentials=/home/greg/passw.smbcredentials
//SERVER/SHARE /MOUNT-POINT smbfs credentials=/path/to/a-name.smbcredentials or in my case
//192.168.1.3/Share /home/greg/Harddrive smbfs credentials=/home/greg/passw.smbcredentials
September 12th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Thanks for helping me on my way to getting my NAS mounted in Ubuntu.
Sadly you didn’t have quite enough information for users of older NAS hardware like myself.
Some older hardware it seems returns the error message “mount error 5 = Input/output error” which for me was frustratingly difficult to track down a solution for. I eventually stumbled across http://public.ok2life.com/welcome/index/75 and found my answer.
So to make the command
# Mount our network drive
//SERVER/SHARE /MOUNT-POINT smbfs guest 0 0
work for older hardware it should look like
# Mount our network drive
//SERVER/SHARE /MOUNT-POINT smbfs guest, nounix 0 0
Hope this helps some more folk as it took me literally days to find the solution.
March 17th, 2010 at 9:16 am
I get to the “gksudo gedit /etc/fstab” but, it does nothing, so i try opening it maunally and putting in the lines but it says, “Can’t open file to write”.
May 11th, 2010 at 5:28 am
Thanks – looking for ages for this!
June 17th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
How I get the IP or the Name of my Network Drive on the net. when I run sudo mount -a , I get error message
mount error: could not resolve address for SERVER: No address associated with hostname
No ip address specified and hostname not found
Please any help is appreciated !