How to mount one of two external drives on startup without login

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How to mount one of two external drives on startup without login

I have a Mac Mini that runs as a server on my network. It has two external USB drives attached: one contains documents, and the other is a TimeMachine backup of the server. Neither disk mounts on a machine on the network until a user interactively logs in, but I would like one of them to be mounted at startup of a MacBook Pro on the network running OS X Mavericks 10.9.3.

The following script was suggested at <https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1200767?answerId=5770284022#5770284022> in response to a desire to mount all external FireWire drives running under OS X 10.5 Leopard:

You can do this with the following command (note: it will ask for your admin password):

sudo cat >/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount.plist <<"EOF"

<?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">

<dict>

<key>AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin</key><true/>

</dict>

</plist>

EOF

I have two questions about this command:

1. Is it valid for OS X Mavericks 10.9.3?

2. Can it be modified to mount only one of the external disks attached to the server (the one containing documents)?

Thanks in advance for your kind assistance with these questions.

Best wishes,

Stuart

Stuart A. Forsyth

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2012), OS X Mavericks (10.9.3)

Posted on Jun 8, 2014 4:17 AM

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Answer 1

Jun 10, 2014 5:46 AM in response to cajonpass

I have seen the same solution posted elsewhere and it was listed as being applicable to Mavericks as well so yes it should work with Mavericks 10.9.3 based on that.

No you cannot limit it to a single drive, it will mount all available drives.

Note: Apparently if you have Server.app installed this is the default behavior i.e. it will already automount external drives. It is only for client Macs i.e. non-servers that it does not automount drives. It is considered best security practice not to have a server logged in as a user.

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Answer 2

Jun 11, 2014 7:53 AM in response to John Lockwood

I can now confirm this file

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount.plist

does automatically get created on Mavericks Servers but not on non-Server Mavericks machines. It is possible to create it on non-Server Mavericks machines and reports are this works as expected.

Obviously the fact it is created automatically by Server.app on Mavericks servers means Mavericks still supports this.

Rather than hand-editing the file as per the original tip the following will achieve the same goal but will result in a binary format plist file which is what Server.app would create.

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

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