Mounting an USB drive both at boot and when plugged in Debian

This happened after a very basic Debian installation. I had a line in the /etc/fstab file that seemed valid:

UUID=d4c189f6-9c38-4961-9afa-a4e24ad8c379 /mountpoint ntfs-3g defaults,auto,nofail 0 0

However, it wasn’t mounting neither at boot nor when I plugged the USB drive. If I ran mount -a it worked.

After googleing a bit, this thread give me the first clue: sudo sh -c "echo usb_storage >> /etc/modules" was necessary because the kernel module usb_storage wasn’t running for some reason.

This allowed Debian to mount the USD drive in /mountpoint at boot, but If I unplugged it and then plugged it again, then it wasn’t automounting. I found the solution for this at the Unix and Linux StackExchange: apt-get install usbmount, since this package wasn’t present in the system.

It worked for me.