RetroPie and Kodi – Disable auto usbmount and choose mount location

I recently installed Kodi next to my RetroPie installation. While all was going well, I disliked that my external drives would be mounted automatically, hence I was not able to specify a permanent Kodi library path to my media. It seemed that when attaching multiple devices the order they got mounted wouldn’t be consistent. I quickly found out RetroPie comes with “usbmount” which auto mounts the USB storage devices.

Disabling the usbmount is as easy as editing the file located at

/etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf

There are a few changes you can make here, but the one we are interested in is one of the first ones available. Changing ENABLED to 0 will disable this add-on (at least not auto mount your drives).

# Change to zero to disable usbmount
ENABLED=0

Now you can edit you /etc/fstab file and mount the drive to a location of your choosing at boot.

/dev/sda1	<Location of your choosing>	ntfs	nofail	0	0

Kodi is able to find your media files in the same directory every time now!