Previously I’d posted on auto-mounting partitions at startup using pysdm. This post shows how you can do so by making use of mount command.

Below steps require root priviliges, so switch to root or prefix sudo to the commands.

For mounting NTFS drives with read and write support, open the terminal and type

mount -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222 /dev/device_name /where_you_want_to_mount

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/device_name /where_you_want_to_mount/

Editor’s note: ntfs has been superseded by ntfs-3g and will mount with read/write privileges. However it may happen that you’ve created a mount point which requires root priviliges for read/write access. Hence I suggest that you create a mount point for your Windows drives within your /home directory, that way you won’t be needing root priviliges

For FAT32 use:

mount -t vfat -o umask=000 /dev/device_name /where_you_want_to_mount

Replace /dev/device_name with your hard disk device partition.

Adding these options to /etc/fstab file will result auto mounting of your drives.

Editor’s note: I don’t suggest touching the /etc/fstab unless its really necessary, as fuse takes care of mounting drives perfectly
PS: If someone knows how to mount ext3 drives with read and write support and other commonly used filesystems please post it as a comment. Adding “user” to the options didn’t work for me.

Editor’s note:
For ext2/3 also, the command remains the same with few changes

mount -t ext3 -o user /dev/device_name /where_you_want_to_mount

Again as mentioned above, it may happen that you’ve created a mount point which requires root priviliges for read/write access and hence you don’t get read/write access.

Bonus tip: If you don’t mention -t option, Linux will autodetect the filesystem type.