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Mount a Windows Drive

This page explains how to mount a shared folder on Windows to Linux. Make sure that the folder you want to share from the PC is shared before you proceed.

Persisting mount

  1. Create a directory where the drive will be mounted, for example in root / or in /mnt.

    cd /

    sudo mkdir Media

  2. Open fstab:

    sudo nano /etc/fstab

  3. Add the following at the bottom of the file.

    //<IP>/<SHARE/FOLDER_NAME> <MOUNT_FOLDER> <SHARE_TYPE> username=<USERNAME>,password=<PASSWORD> 0 0
    • Change <IP>/<SHARE/FOLDER_NAME> to the path of your shared folder that you want to mount. If you use a share on e.g. TrueNAS, you put the name of the share.
    • Change <MOUNT_FOLDER> to the path of the folder you created earlier.
    • Change <SHARE_TYPE> to the chare type.
    • Change <USERNAME> and <PASSWORD> to the credentials nedded to access the shared folder. It can be the Windows user account credentials or the user credentials for the network share.
    • The two 0's at the and should always be present and means that the mount should not be becked up and that it should not be checked by fscheck (filesystem check) since it does not handle wetwork shares anyway.
    Example
    //192.168.1.1/Media /Media cifs username=user,password=password 0 0

  4. Save the file and exit. Now the folder will be mounted when the VM boots.

  5. Check if the mount worked by cd into the directory and run ls:

    cd /Media

    ls

  6. Restart the VM for the changes to take effect.

    sudo reboot

    Tip

    You can run sudo mount -a if you want to reload the mounts withoud rebooting.

Non-persisting mount

This method is not recommended in most cases.

  1. Create a directory for the mounted drive.

    sudo mkdir -p /mnt/shared_folder

  2. Mount the drive.

    sudo mount -t cifs -o username=your_username,password=your_password //remote-pc-ip/shared_folder /mnt/shared_folder
    • Change your_username and your_password to the Microsoft account credentials.

    • Change //remote-pc-ip/shared_folder to the path to the shared folder.

      Example: share the whole E: drive named Plex media from a PC with IP 192.168.1.100. The path to that drive is //192.168.1.100/'Plex media'.

    • Change /mnt/shared_folder to the path of the target folder you created before.