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

Reply
11 replies

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>

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.

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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How do I keep external drives mounted when logged out

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