How can I Auto Mount my Airport Disk in Lion?

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How can I Auto Mount my Airport Disk in Lion?

I am trying to find a way to auto mount my airport disk automatically in Lion

I have found the below linked article which mentions going to the main page in 'Airport Disk Utility' but I dont have this application on my mac and cant find anywhere to down load it, I only have the 'Airport Utility' which does not have any options for automatically mounting an Airport Disk

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1331

Is there a way to do this without having to add the Airport Disk to login items in Accounts as I also have a MacBook Pro which is used a lot when not at home and surely there must be a more elegant way to make this work

Thanks

J

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7), 2.5 Ghz Core i5 4GB RAM

Posted on Aug 15, 2011 4:46 PM

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Answer 1

prokey

Level 1

4 points

Aug 22, 2011 3:49 PM in response to thewoodyone

I saw that article too. The word on the 'net is that Airport Disk Utility was depreciated after Leopard was released, so that help document must be really old.

To automatically mount network disks on startup or login, go to System Preferences > Users & Groups and then select Login Items.

Access your disk from the Finder sidebar and make sure it shows up on the desktop. If it doesn't, you can CMD-SHIFT-G to /Volumes to get access to the drive.

Drag the network disk's icon from the Desktop to the Login Items window. It will appear in your list of login items, and will mount automatically if the disk is available at boot.

Now everytime you login, your disks will mount.

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Answer 2

WhoDaKat

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Oct 16, 2011 7:37 PM in response to thewoodyone

Obviously no answers here, but did you ever find a solution? (Other than the login itmes way).

I am having this same issue, it seems like this should be more seemless...

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Answer 3

thewoodyone Author

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Oct 29, 2011 4:46 AM in response to WhoDaKat

I have not found any other solutions yet, I was hoping for a more seemless solution as well as adding as a startup item is not ideal 😟

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Answer 4

WhoDaKat

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Oct 29, 2011 9:31 AM in response to thewoodyone

Drive Mounter... its in the App Store and they have a free version. Although the free version has a ridiculous amount of reminders that your on the free one, it still does the trick.

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Answer 5

Dec 29, 2011 8:41 PM in response to thewoodyone

Ran into the same problem recently - I didn't have much luck with Drive Mounter as it didn't seem to like the Airport Disk. However I discovered you can mount them easily with AppleScript. (I need the volume to stay open so that CrashPlan willl find it on my parents' laptops - without needing for them to go clicking anything. Setting it as a login item hasn't seemed to work.)

The AppleScript:

tell application "Finder" to mount volume "afp://user:pass@path"

You can find the path from the Finder, under Go/Connect To Server... and choosing the server from the list of recent servers.

You can run the one-liner AppleScript from the terminal:

osascript -e ' tell application "Finder" to mount volume "afp://user:pass@path" '

And in my case, schedule a cron job to do it every hour.

(That said I seem to get an error if the drive is not available so maybe this isn't such a great idea. Anyhow, credit where due: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/3741/how-can-i-automount-afp-volumes-at -startup )

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Answer 6

thewoodyone Author

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Jan 1, 2012 11:21 AM in response to thewoodyone

Hi

Thanks to everyone who has replied so far but I am looking for a more elegant way to resolve this issue rather than having to set the airport disk as a start up item or have apple scripts running just to auto mount it, which doesnt make the macbook very happy when not connected to the network and it cant see the drive.

From further reading it seems that Mac OSX doesnt auto mount ANY network drives on start up, is this true? it would seem a little limiting and an odd thing to miss and as a user I shouldnt have to put up with a make do sticky tape solution of running applescripts or placing a network drive in my start up items

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Justin

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Answer 7

NMMacGuy

Level 1

9 points

Mar 10, 2012 7:30 PM in response to prokey

This method of dragging the shared drive to login items doesn't work at all. There doesn't seem to be a way to auto-mount an airport extreme drive anymore. What's up with this??

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Answer 8

ca1231

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Mar 11, 2012 8:02 PM in response to NMMacGuy

I would like to see a solution to this as well.

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Answer 9

NMMacGuy

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9 points

Mar 11, 2012 9:18 PM in response to ca1231

I was able to use the Airport Utility to instead of connect to disk --

with "disk password" instead of with a "device password".

This allowed the prior method to work, where you drag the volume to the login item. Now, I wasn't able to hide it, it always shows up, but at least its working now. I have my wife and I sharing same external library. And you don't have to manually connect first.

Note that device password is the default.

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Answer 10

thewoodyone Author

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Mar 23, 2012 1:52 PM in response to thewoodyone

I have been able to auto mount my AirDisk by downloading Drive Mounter off the App Store, this auto mounts the drive for me as I can not get it to work any other way

this works great on the MacBook as it only tries to mount the drive when connected to my AirPort network so doesnt throw up any mounting errors when out and about 🙂

Heres hoping one day that Apple fixes this little quirk so it works nicely like everything else 🙂

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Answer 11

iSmile

Level 4

1,119 points

Dec 4, 2012 8:12 PM in response to NMMacGuy

NMMacGuy's solution worked for me. I switched from "disk password" to "device password" and now my airport disk mounts as expected. I can fast user switch and come back to my account and the AirDisk is still mounted. I can log out and log back in (or restart) and the AirDisk will automount on my desktop (and the folder open, which I don't care for, but at least the disk automounts.)

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