Drives Mounted as Odd IDs? (UUID)

If your drives are showing up as long IDs that look similar to "5f3d2340-b3c7-4c47-ba9a-ceaa9e699a4f" (from df -T command), there are a number of things that may have caused this. I've found that if my partitions are all labeled and the nodiskmount flag is still present in my grub configuration, then I no longer have this problem.

NewzBook is an application I wrote to centrally manage my downloads and media. It has integration points with various indexing sites, SABnzbd, media management, etc. I originally designed the application for the Popcorn Hour, but I am now using XBMC again. I personally use the XBMC Live variant, so I've written up some instructions so other XBMC Live users could also use my NewzBook app. Here's how to install NewzBook on XBMC Live... (article in progress)

Whenever I install XBMC, one of the first settings I change is I enable auto mounting of drives. It's a relatively simple change, but requires you modify a file on the filesystem.

For Ubuntu Lucid 10.04:

I've noticed that it's not necessary to manually remove the nodiskmount option on 10.04 (grub2). When I removed the nodiskmount I started having some issues with the disks being mounted in odd ways (eg. my NTFS drive being mounted directly to /media). You may need to label your partitions for them to show up properly -- you can label your partitions using the e2label command. However, if you'd still like to modify the grub parameters for other reasons, I've included the details below...

Open the file /etc/default/grub:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Find the line for loading your system (usually starts with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUXDEFAULT) and make sure it's not the commented out line that often comes default at the top of the file. Modify this line so it no longer has the nodiskmount option in it.

Save the file and close it. Ctrl+O, Enter, Ctrl+X.

Run the following line to update grub and then reboot:

sudo update-grub
sudo reboot

For Ubuntu Karmic:

If you are still booting from the XBMC-Live 9.11 Camelot USB stick directly, this will be in the syslinux.cfg file. If you have installed XBMC to disk, this is in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. 

To remove this flag from the menu.lst file, telnet into the XBMC machine (use the instructions from the sabnzbd install post if you don't know how), then open up the file with your favorite editor:

sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst (you may have to enter your root username and password -- typically xbmc / xbmc)

Arrow down to the first line under "## ## End Default Options ##" near the bottom of the file and on the "kernel" line arrow to the right until you see the "nodiskmount" text. Delete this text then press Ctrl+O [enter] to save the file then Ctrl+X to exit. Reboot your box and you should now see some new items in your file manager usually named something like sdb1 or sda1.

I have always noticed that when people ask the question 'How do I figure out how much hard drive space I have left' as it relates to the Linux / *nix shell, people always respond telling people to use the following command:

df

Output:

$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb5             56870784  22222576  31759324  42% /
...
/dev/sda1               252960    122460    130496  49% /media/sda1
/dev/sda3            1441394492 1372242748  69151740  96% /media/sda3

In the above example, everything is hard to read since it's in units of one thousand bytes. On some systems this defaults to multiples of 512 bytes unless you specific the -k option. I'm surprised that they don't mention that if you add one simple switch (-h for human readable), you can make the output much easier to read on most systems:

df -h

Output:

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb5              55G   22G   31G  42% /
...
/dev/sda1             248M  120M  128M  49% /media/sda1
/dev/sda3             1.4T  1.3T   66G  96% /media/sda3

In the above example, you can see that I've used 1.3 terabytes of my main system drive, leaving me with 66 gigabytes free.

Side Note: You can also find out what file system type you are using by running the following command:

df- T

And it will produce the following results:

Filesystem    Type   1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb1     ext3    19228276  14737848   3513680  81% /
tmpfs        tmpfs      383960         4    383956   1% /dev/shm