USB drives don't automount on boot

[dex Otaku]

Greetings,

I use multiple USB drives on my Kubuntu/WinXP dual boot machine.

Kubuntu fails to automount any removable drives during boot. This happens both with USB drives and CD/DVD media.

If I pull the one read-only flash drive I have plugged in all the time and plug it back in, ALL of the removable drives suddenly show up on the desktop. To clarify: removing/reattaching any single removable medium causes all of them to show up. They do not, however, automount until I open them all individually with either Konqueror or Dolphin. This means that, for example, my music library on my external USB hard disc is inaccessible from Amarok until after I've opened the drive and accessed it from a file manager [simply opening Amarok fails to wake it up].

Is there a way to get Kubuntu to automatically mount all removable media during boot, rather than having to remove/reattach at least one of them and then access them directly with one file manager or another, after KDE is finished loading?

Thanks,
D

[dibl]

Re: USB drives don't automount on boot

Because USB devices, and the USB bus, are designed for "hot plugging", it's a bit of an unnatural arrangement to have them mounted automatically at boot, like internal hard drives.

However, I did set up a NTFS-formatted USB memory stick to be automatically mounted one time, by setting it up in /etc/fstab as a "mount by UUID" mount line, i.e. "UUID=1234abcd ...". I don't know any reason why you could not do the same thing with an external USB drive, if you wanted to. Probably you could also "mount by Label" --- label it and then use "Label=nameofmydrive ... " to have it mounted in /etc/fstab.

So, you need to make the mount point in /media, then run

sudo blkid

to determine the UUID of the drive, and then edit /etc/fstab as root and add the line and the mount point and the filesystem type and the options, similar to any other hard drive.