Problems with second hard drive (not detected until click, and extra win10 loader)

Question

I've recently become an Ubuntu convert from windows 10, and i've really loved it so far. It's really far better than windows for development and alot of other things I do regularly.

However, there are 2 problems that I cant seem to be able to solve. I have 2 card drives, a 128GB SSD, and a 1TB HDD. Previously, my windows will be installed on the SSD, and the various programs on the HDD. Initially, I reformatted my SSD, and installed Ubuntu 16.04 on it. Only after installing ubuntu, did i go and reformat the HDD Into NTFS. This has caused some issues.

1) I followed a few stack overflow guides, that told me i can still install programs on the HDD in ubuntu, just by finding where it's mounted and installing there. its mounted under

/media/wboy/HDD_NAME

I've installed dropbox, anaconda, and other stuff there, but i realise dropbox throws a "media directory changed, relink or exit" something error , and all my symlinks / programs are NOT accessible until i click the harddrive icon in the launcher to view that drive. Then magically the symlinks and stuff will work again. Is there a way to fix this? I dont want to have to click the drive in the launcher every time i restart my computer.

2) I dont know why whenever on load, it shows me a grub menu, i only have ubuntu installed. BUt the options are: ubuntu, ubuntu advanced options, memtestx86, some other memtest, and windows 10 loader (/dev/sda1). Why do i have a windows 10 loader? i clean installed ubuntu, there shouldnt be a loader! selecting the loader loads a blank screen which goes nowhere. I suspect i screwed up somewhere with LVM, but im not really sure.

Would appreciate any guidance from the awesome Ubuntu community!

Thank you so much for reading! :)

Answer 1

• Open Disks utility in Ubuntu.
• Go to the hard drive which you want to mount at your desired location.
• Unmount the selected partition.
• Open its settings and select 'Edit Mount Options...'
• Then change the mount point to the location which you get after typing 'pwd' after manually mounting your hard drive.
• Change the 'identify As' field to /dev/disk/by-label/Data (You may have something else but that won't matter much)
• Save and Remount the hard drive and it will start mounting automatically.

Answer 2

In answer to your first question: You can find out how to auto-mount NTFS partitions on boot here.

Answer 3

I wrote an answer for a similar issue you can check it out here.

The settings with grub can be changed so it doesn't show the menu at boot time if you choose .. you need to edit the /etc/default/grub file and after you make the changes you need to run sudo update-grub or an easier way is to google Grub Customizer for a graphical interface.