Here’s the documentation I created for myself seventeen years ago. It’s from the perspective of a Mac user with hardly any command-line knowledge, so I was distilling things I’d learned researching all over the web that morning. Some of it may be inaccurate on technical details due to my finite understanding at the time. Hope this helps.

Mounting noauto drives using diskutil.

The challenge is how to automate the mounting of drives that have a noauto configuration in /bin/fstab.

One would normally mount these drives by using diskutil list to display the device-id of the unmounted drives. The drives could then be mounted by using diskutil mount device-id. Unfortunately, the device-id is not static and this is ,therefore, not viable for automation. The solution is to employ a shell script to mount the drives by their name.

	Steps:
	1. Create shell script in /bin/
	2. Make the script an executable
	3. Add to cron

Step 1: Creating the shell script Start by creating the script in the directory /bin/

	sudo vi /bin/mounter.sh

The following is the basis for the shell script:

	#!/bin/bash
	theDisk=`diskutil list | awk ‘/diskName/ {print $NF}’`
	diskutil mount $theDisk

Using this code, mounter.sh would be able to mount the disk “120GB” by calling its name anywhere in the command line. However, any call to diskutil run through cron will result in the following notification to /var/mail/danyoung :

	/bin/mounter.sh: line 1: diskutil: command not found
	/bin/mounter.sh: line 3: diskutil: command not found

The solution is use of an absolute path, as cron does not run as a shell environment. The call must be made as:

	/usr/sbin/diskutil

The completed shell script looks like this:

	#!/bin/bash
	theDisk=`/usr/sbin/diskutil list | awk ‘/diskName/ {print $NF}’`
	/usr/sbin/diskutil mount $theDisk

Step 2: Make executable After saving the file it must be made an executable:

	sudo chmod +x /bin/mounter.sh

Step 3: Add to cron Add the script to cron using Cronnix. The command to execute is simply the path to the shell script:

	/bin/mounter.sh

Further notes:

The shell script was discovered in an example at radiotope.com but was missing the absolute path. The solution of using an absolute path was given in a forum at macosxhints.com. The exact pages follow: 1. http://www.radiotope.com/writing/?p=64 2. http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?s=b0306f161f40e5ea07b2eea9f18ad2f2&t=60811

Additional information about writing a first shell script and making it executable was at the following: 1. http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/07/02/terminal_5.html