My Book disk drive is not mounted during boot [Solved]

[hlupost]

I have a "My Book" (mirror edition) on a USB connection. It has worked flawlessly - a Western Digital icon turned up on the desktop from the first run of Mint 9 - but now I get this message during boot: "The disk drive for /media/My Book is not ready yet or not present. Continue to mount or press S to stop mounting or M for manual recovery."

Pressing either s or m does not help and Mint just hangs. I have been able to make it work by forcing a shutdown (pressing the "on button" ), cutting the power to the Western Digital drive, reconnecting and turning on the pc. But the problem persists and I to my knowledge I haven't changed anything.

Entry in fstab looks like this:
#Entry for /dev/sdh1 :
UUID=345CAFB75CAF7272 /media/My\040Book ntfs defaults,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks,uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=0077 0 0

Can anybody help me?

[remoulder]

Faulty drive perhaps?

[hlupost]

Maybe a periodic error because now it seems to be ok. I just wonder - is that how Mint normally behaves when a drive errs during the OS startup phase? It surprised me that the system repeatedly hung and that pressing either s or m did not help. Is the solution to such a situation to start Mint in safe mode and edit fstab?

[remoulder]

If the drive is mounted in fstab it is effectively a permanent mount and the OS will keep attempting to mount it. Not sure why the options fail to work but being a USB drive, do you need this to be mounted in fstab or could you mount it from the desktop or at login?

[hlupost]

I would like it to mount automatically because it is a backup drive. Is there a better way of doing it? (thank you for answering my newbie questions )

[remoulder]

I would like it to mount automatically because it is a backup drive

How often do you use it for backup? If every day then fine, if only occasionally you might be better just mounting it when needed? If you run a backup script, you could mount the drive in the script. You should also (though haven't tried this myself) be able to mount the drive in your Startup Programs by creating a command such as udisks --mount /dev/sdb1 --mount-fstype ntfs. You could try this in a terminal first by commenting out the line in fstab and restarting, and this assumes your drive is at /dev/sdb, use sudo fdisk -l to list devices.

[hlupost]

Thank you for helping.