Mounting FAT32 partition automatically at boot

In Gutsy, all my partitions would be mounted automatically at boot. At the time I was thinking that I want that for my FAT32 partition, which I store most files on, but not for my NTFS (windows) partition, which I generally don’t need access to.

After installing Hardy, things have changed around and neither of those two partitions are mounted automatically. They mount when I choose them in the “Places” menu. That is good for the NTFS partition, but quite annoying with the FAT32 partition, as I have photos, music files, wallpapers, etc on there. Which means, to play a song I first have to click on the drive to mount it and then load the media player (banshee, or…). Also, my wallpaper doesn’t show up until I have clicked on (i.e. mounted) the partition.

So, after some searching, I found some instructions about how to edit the /etc/fstab file. This page here is quite useful among others: http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

It seems that the fstab file has changed somewhat with Hardy, and the changes seem pretty difficult to understand for a newbie like me, but I decided to try it out following the somewhat older instructions. This is what I have done:

• backup fstab: sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.backup
• make a directory to mount the partition in: sudo mkdir /media/fat-partition
• find out about my partitions: sudo fdisk -l
• edit fstab: sudo gedit /etc/fstab
  …added the line: /dev/sda3 /media/fat-partition vfat defaults,nosuid,nodev 0 0
• save and reboot

…I am writing this just before the reboot, so lets see what happens…

UPDATE: at first it seemed to work… but then it didn’t. I have postponed solving this issue until after the Intrepid Ibex upgrade. Perhaps it won’t even be there anymore.