rin

Automounting, (even permanently on reboot), a portable/external USB-Drive is not as simple as adding a line in /etc/fstab,-like you would do for any internal sata/hdd/ssd/nvme/...
I initially tried installing "autofs" and "udisks2", and fiddling with that and "/etc/fstab", ... and I could get it to automount with the system up, and it would survive the first reboot, but it would NOT mount-at-boot after other consecutive reboots.?!
 
Instead, I ended up re-flashing "Armbian_24.11.1_Odroidc4_noble_current_6.6.60-kisak.img" on my emmc, and followed basically this below guide:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/765721/trying-to-automatically-mount-a-usb-drive-on-debian-bookworm-when-connected
(see "1 Answer" in above link).
-I commented out|removed the "UUID=<output-of-bklid-for-sda1>   /media/USB01 ..." line in my /etc/fstab, since the "systemd-mount" command, triggered by the new udev rule, is now doing the heavy lifting.
The important thing is, I needed my USB-drive to survive reboots and to automount on boot, but before my network comes up, which it now does.
 I'm not exactly sure why this all works, and I still need to fine tune some "systemd-mount" options, ...
 
That said, years ago, on my x86_64-ubuntu-desktop, with "usbmount", lol, I remember simply having to add a line in my /etc/fstab and my USB-drive would automount on boot.
anyway, it appears systemd is everywhere these days, including mounting.

I'll mark this as SOLVED.