Entries in fstab exist ONLY to specify things to mount at system boot or manually with mount -a, right? But I was reading up on the noauto mount flag, which apparently makes corresponding fstab entries NOT auto mounted.
So why would you ever put an entry in fstab with noauto? What purpose would it serve?
My guess is that I'm wrong about fstab's only purpose being to provide arguments to mount -a.
A noauto entry in fstab is one which, for different reasons, you do not want to have mounted automatically, at boot and with the mount -a command. It is mounted by specifying the device or the mount point explicitly, like in
sudo mount /dev/sdb1
or
sudo mount /home/MyName/MyMountPoint
The cases in which you do not necessarily wish a device to be mounted at boot are numerous,for instance when we are talking about a network device, which may or may not be available at boot time (you could be on a laptop, and away from home). Or it might be an encrypted device, for which you have to provide a password, and you want to have to do that only when you truly need that. And so on.
In fact, fstab is used to provide rules by which devices are mounted, whether at boot time or not.
UUID=C68E30678E3051E3 /mnt/ntfs1 ntfs-3g noauto,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=0022 0 0
For a usb ssd or usb key formated with ntfs, if the usb device is not connected when the computer start or reboot, the reboot will wait because it would mount the ntfs device but it is not present. So, the boot will take a long time... with the noauto option during the boot the device is not mounted. When you are in the windows (I use kununtu), the device will be mounted automatically and when you open the file manager a message like the /mnt/ntfs1 is not mounted will appear. Just click on the device on the left and the ntfs device will be mounted and you will see your files there.
