Because of the limited amount of storage on my Mac Mini I have typically had my home directory on an external drive (512GB SSD in a USB-C 3.1 10Gbps enclosure; changing my home location through system prefs by right clicking on the account holding option and selecting Advanced Options).
This worked great under Mojave. Since upgrading to Catalina though I've been running into a problem with it. Seems that Catalina doesn't mount any external drives before you are logged in, but this causes a problem if you don't mount the drive containing your home directory until after you have logged in. (if you log in it will try to create a new home directory for you, renaming the mount point in `/Volumes` where the external drive would get mounted because of a conflict).
At them moment I can work around this by loggin into a second account I don't normally use and keep exclusively on the internal SSD (which mounts the external drive) and then fast user switching to my real account (which can then log in properly as the drive is already mounted).
Anyone know of any way to force it to actually mount the external drives before the first login to avoid this work-around?
