I’m running a Ubuntu server on my old laptop with an external HDD connected to it. The external HDD is powered independently from the laptop, as it is plugged into the wall.
During a power outage, my laptop remains operational due to its battery, but the HDD shuts down. When power is restored, my laptop does not automatically remount the HDD, and I have to reboot the system manually to access it.
Does anyone know how I can resolve this issue?


This is correct. I made my drive auto mount using /etc/fstab, and I believe that is only checked once during boot.
You can run mount -a to mount all fstab entries. You could put that in a cronjob I guess
Nah, that’s good. What I mean is, if it’s in /etc/fstab, it should be possible to manually mount it without a reboot. Have you tried manually remounting it after power comes back?
Nope, I haven’t tried that. But I will give it a try when the next power outage occurs. I actually didn’t know I could manually remount until today. I’m still pretty new to selfhosting.
Gotcha. Yeah, the stuff in fstab is just a convenience; it’s equivalent to running a bunch of mount commands at boot. You might be able to just run “mount” again without the '-o remount" option. I was just listing that in case you were seeing some kind of errors in trying to manually mount it.