There were a couple of threads on automounting and I was thinking of sharing this anyway. In my case, using Ubuntu, the problem is that my server is rebooted remotely, but attached USB drives don't automount until I log in at the console. They would then mount in /media/${USER}/ It turns out there is a simple answer -- find the drive device in /dev (say it turns out to be /dev/sdd2) and then run a command that looks like this: udisksctl mount -b /dev/sdd2 My little one-liner script below simplifies this (and helps me remember) by allowing me to do this instead: automount_drive d2 To find the proper device info, you can use fdisk -l, as root. For me this one-liner provides exactly the drives I'm looking for and nothing else: ( sudo fdisk -l | grep -E "[0-9]T .*(NTFS|Microsoft)" ) 2>&1 | grep -v "physical sector boundary" Best, Mike #/bin/bash # mounts USB drive in /media/${USER}/ # # It is assumed to be /dev/sdXN (where XN are a letter and an number) # syntax: # # automount_drive XN # # example - this mounted /media/mbmiller/DriveA: # # automount_drive f2 # # It (sometimes) prompts for user password, then reports the mount point # # Those may change. To get the newest sdXN values, do this: # # sudo fdisk -l # # But that pumps out a lot. To find the attached drives with multiple TBs # of storage, try this: # # sudo fdisk -l | grep -P "\dT " # # It's a simple command: udisksctl mount -b /dev/sd$1