This post will show how to add your different partitions of HDD at boot time. After completing the exercise you will not need to mount the partitions evry time you login. This is a guide for beginners and I assume that you know nothing about linux commands.
You might have more then 1 HDD in your system. Linux provides name to each HDD and its partition. Like first partition in first HDD may have a label sda1. To know how to find these name there is a simple utility in latest version of almost all linux distributions that is called Disk Utility. You just need to go to you Fedora Activities or Ubuntu Dashboard and type disk or you can search it in Accessories. I assume that you are using GNOME 3. Otherwise you can go to Applications -> Accessories. After opening you can find all the media devices in your computer system. Just go to your device and click at the partition which you want to be mounted at boot time. You will see the device name at below label as Device. Below is a snapshot of Disk Utility at my PC with Fedora 16.
Here my Device label is Data and name is /dev/sdb11. Now yuo have got the Device name. Now you have to create a mount point. Simply said a folder in either /media or in /mount. For this you have to type a command
sudo mkdir /media/DATA
Provide root or Administrator password if asked. After that you need to open a file in /etc directory. Type the command
sudo vim /etc/fstab
You can also use gedit instead of vim. Here you will find that there are a lot of lines already presented. Need not worry just go to the end of the file and add a line there. This line will have 6 fields. First will be device name (/dev/sdb11), second is mount point (/media/DATA), third is file system type (ntfs-3g, FAT, ext4 etc), fourth is options (there are many options but for beginners I will say type defaults), dump (dump should backup file system 0 = No, 1 = Yes, set 0 for removable devices), needs checked (fsck order on reboots 0=don't check, 1=root filesystem, 2=other filesystems). For example I added the line
/dev/sdb11 /media/DATA ntfs-3g defaults 0 0
Thats it. Now you can reboot your system and see the things are working.
You might have more then 1 HDD in your system. Linux provides name to each HDD and its partition. Like first partition in first HDD may have a label sda1. To know how to find these name there is a simple utility in latest version of almost all linux distributions that is called Disk Utility. You just need to go to you Fedora Activities or Ubuntu Dashboard and type disk or you can search it in Accessories. I assume that you are using GNOME 3. Otherwise you can go to Applications -> Accessories. After opening you can find all the media devices in your computer system. Just go to your device and click at the partition which you want to be mounted at boot time. You will see the device name at below label as Device. Below is a snapshot of Disk Utility at my PC with Fedora 16.
Here my Device label is Data and name is /dev/sdb11. Now yuo have got the Device name. Now you have to create a mount point. Simply said a folder in either /media or in /mount. For this you have to type a command
sudo mkdir /media/DATA
Provide root or Administrator password if asked. After that you need to open a file in /etc directory. Type the command
sudo vim /etc/fstab
You can also use gedit instead of vim. Here you will find that there are a lot of lines already presented. Need not worry just go to the end of the file and add a line there. This line will have 6 fields. First will be device name (/dev/sdb11), second is mount point (/media/DATA), third is file system type (ntfs-3g, FAT, ext4 etc), fourth is options (there are many options but for beginners I will say type defaults), dump (dump should backup file system 0 = No, 1 = Yes, set 0 for removable devices), needs checked (fsck order on reboots 0=don't check, 1=root filesystem, 2=other filesystems). For example I added the line
/dev/sdb11 /media/DATA ntfs-3g defaults 0 0
Thats it. Now you can reboot your system and see the things are working.