How do I keep external drives mounted when logged out

Question

Level 1

29 points

How do I keep external drives mounted when logged out

To my surprise, external drives mounted via USB or FireWire get unmounted when no one is logged in.

Is there any way to keep these drive(s) mounted?

Also, it would be nice if when the machine wakes, that it would wait until these drive(s) are mounted.

Mac Mini, Mac OS X (10.5.1), Core2Duo

Posted on Nov 29, 2007 9:12 PM

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Answer 1

slobasso Author

Level 1

29 points

Nov 30, 2007 1:18 AM in response to slobasso

I finally found a solution, thank you Google.

Create the file
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount.plist
with the following contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin</key><true/>
</dict>
</plist>

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Answer 2

slobasso Author

Level 1

29 points

Nov 30, 2007 12:12 AM in response to baltwo

I know this because I can ssh into the machine from another Mac. As far as I can tell, this seems to be a feature to unmount all volumes if no one is logged in through the GUI.

I'm very comfortable modifying startup scripts and I can write shell scripts. I just need the magic to mount these drives at boot and keep the mounted.

At first I thought sleep was the issue, but the unmount at logout is the real issue.

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Answer 3

slobasso Author

Level 1

29 points

Nov 30, 2007 12:54 AM in response to baltwo

This is not a networking issue. This is a disk mounting issue. At boot time, only the boot disk is mounted. When users log in via the GUI other disks are mounted. It may appear as though they are always mounted, but they are only mounted when users are logged in via the GUI.

In past versions of OS X there seemed to be a feature to automount external disks at boot time without requiring a GUI login.

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Answer 4

Nov 30, 2007 12:52 PM in response to slobasso

or you could have used this one liner in the Terminal app to create the plist.

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool true

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Answer 5

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Nov 30, 2007 12:06 AM in response to slobasso

And, how do you know this? When no one's logged in, there's no Desktop and you can't run any apps, so, IMO, there's no way to tell if they're mounted. As for the sleep thing, are you sleeping the HDs?

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Answer 6

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Nov 30, 2007 12:24 AM in response to slobasso

Ah! The missing details. In order to ssh to the machine, don't you have to login? I don't do that kind of stuff since I'm not on a network, so maybe that's what happens. You might get a better response at the networking forum.

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Answer 7

Dec 1, 2007 1:37 AM in response to slobasso

A plist file can be saved in text-based XML or binary format. Binary format offers a smaller footprint and loads faster. Binary format plists can be viewed with the Property List Editor or converted to text-based XML with the command line tool plutil.

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Answer 8

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Nov 30, 2007 1:15 AM in response to slobasso

OK. I defer to your explanation. Sorry for intruding. Good luck.

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Answer 9

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Nov 30, 2007 12:04 PM in response to slobasso

Nice find. Thanks for the feedback. Good computing.

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Answer 10

slobasso Author

Level 1

29 points

Nov 30, 2007 10:08 PM in response to Mark Jalbert

I actually tried this and it didn't create the xml content that I wanted. I seems to create a file with some binary content. I'm not sure what's up with that.

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Answer 11

slobasso Author

Level 1

29 points

Dec 2, 2007 12:51 PM in response to Mark Jalbert

That looks like it worked too.

Thanks, the first time I tried that, I must have mistyped something and it didn't work.

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