USB automount problems, again

[pwabrahams]

There are lots of posts about USB mounting problems, but I haven't seen any about the particular combination of circumstances I've encountered.

When I insert my USB stick drive, it is detected correctly and shows up as it should in dmesg. However, it doesn't automount. I was having some problems with hal not working and I thought that was the cause, but now I've fixed hal (by correcting /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf to eliminate the default deny entries as suggested in another post), and I still have no success in getting automounting to work. However, explicit mounting as in mount /dev/sdb1 /media/usb0 works perfectly.

Is there someplace where I'm supposed to be activating automount for USB drives? I've installed usbmount, pmount, autofs, and gnome-volume-manager but that doesn't help.

[Qqmike]

Re: USB automount problems, again

Have you tried
K > System Settings > Advanced > Dis & Filesystems
, Administrator button at lower right ... etc
That fixes it for some folks, not for others.

[pwabrahams]

Disk & Filesystems

It looks to me as though Disk and Filesystems only has entries for specific devices, not the open-ended entities that would be needed for USB memory sticks. For instance, the entry for CDROM has the characteristics of the specific drive on my machine even though there's no CD in it at the moment. I don't see what I can put into it to handle the memory sticks, since there are several different kinds of them.

[Qqmike]

Re: USB automount problems, again

Yes, you are right about that (I think).
Now, I DO know that partitions on USB flash drives do have their own unique UUIDs (based on my experiments). Thus, perhaps you can rig up entries in fstab using each UUID. This subject has come up here recently, too, so perhaps a search. As a cheap experiment, though, I'd try the fstab entry (just rig up an entry by copying some other for the stick).

(I have the same problem as you, btw; but for my work, I can simply manually mount).

[pwabrahams]

fstab -- works but is not very satisfying

I know I can get access to a USB memory stick by putting an entry in fstab -- in fact, I had such an entry earlier on. But that doesn't work well if the stick is being plugged and unplugged, or being replaced by a different stick.

Automounting used to work fine until I upgraded (?!) to Hardy. I wish I knew which system component has dropped the ball here. autofs, dbus, hal, and usbmount are the obvious suspects, but none of them are issuing any complaints

[pwabrahams]

Problem mostly solved, but not fully

It seems that if usbmount is installed, the USB memory sticks do get mounted and unmounted automatically, as they should, with the first drive appearing as /media/usb0. However, there are no notifications of mounting and unmounting. The usbmount documentation notes that usbmount is a "lightweight" solution and, by itself, does no notification.

hal seems to know about mounted drives, but it isn't doing any notification either. So now I wonder: what software component is responsible for posting the notification to the desktop when a drive is mounted?