Newby Needs Help Mounting HDD

[Bashing-om]

lenny54linux; Hey hey

Progress is being made

We are all at some point on the learning curve - none knows all there is to know.
Now I will expose some of my ignorance.
As you have executed:

in root do : touch /etc/fstab

I am unsure what that results in, as "touch" creates a new file - did that command overwrite the /etc/fstab file that "was" ?
The tool here to modify a file is a text editor - of which there are many many. Which one depends on your desktop environment (nano is universal but maybe above your skills present;y to employ). You can edit stuff from gedit, mousepad - for the GUI - or whatever text editor you use and paste it into the file with "sudo" privileges.

I think next we need to see what is current for the /etc/fstab file.
show us

cat /etc/fstab

this ain't nothing but a thing

[TheFu]

Manpage says:
touch - change file timestamps

To "touch" a file tries to update the mtime for that file to the current time. Directories are just files too, BTW. For external "watching" programs that look for updates to a file, this could launch some action. inotify works in this way - that's off topic, but slightly interesting.

Since systemd took over the fstab, there are 2 ways to have updates to the fstab noticed by the OS.
* sudo mount -a # forces a re-read of the the file and mounts everything it would just like reboot.
* sudo systemctl daemon-reload # not exactly certain what the really does, but I think it relooks at all the boot system files for changes and recreates any systemd "unit" files. Unit files are how different parts of systemd are configured. Every mount line in the /etc/fstab is turned into a mount unit file, for example.

I was fairly certain that the link in post #18 above had step-by-step instructions for mounting.