Sunrise Heron Silhouette by Brandon Godfrey

A few days I installed Cygwin on a new laptop.  I saw the warnings that Cygwin 1.7.x is new but I chose to ignore it for now.

I soon noticed that Cygwin was not remembering my mounts.  After reading this on the Cygwin front page I realized I needed to do some more research.

… the mount point storage has been moved out of the registry into files. User mount points are NOT copied into the new user-specific /etc/fstab.d/$USER file. Rather, every user has to call the /bin/copy-user-registry-fstab shell script once after the update.

Next I looked at the /etc/fstab file which pointed me to the Cygwin Mount Table documentation.  Using this documentation I did the following steps so that my mounts are always remembered.

1. Manually mounted the C: drive.

   $ mount c: /c

2. Ran mount to determine what to add to my /etc/fstab.

   $ mount
   C:/cygwin/bin on /usr/bin type ntfs (binary,auto)
   C:/cygwin/lib on /usr/lib type ntfs (binary,auto)
   C:/cygwin on / type ntfs (binary,auto)
   C: on /c type ntfs (binary,user)

3. Based on the output of mount I added this line to my /etc/fstab.

   C: /c ntfs binary,user

4. Closed the Cygwin shell, opened a new one and verified the C: drive was properly mounted.

Update 06-15-2010: I should have just followed Cygwin’s directions and ran /bin/copy-user-registry-fstab.