How to Automount an External USB Hard Drive...

[Morari]

I have an external USB hard drive. When I was using Edgy it would mount it self much like a CD would and put a nifty little icon on my desktop whether it was turned on when I booted in or if I turned it on later. Now that I'm on Feisty however, this doesn't seem to be the case. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how to get to it at all now that it's not on the desktop...

[Steffen]

Re: How to Automount an External USB Hard Drive...

Just started using Kubuntu myself, so I dont know much. But I just got a nice tip(look at my thread under yours) of a program called KwikDisk(you will find it in adept). You will get a nice icon in try that you can use to unmount disks. Guess there are othere methods as well...

[Morari]

Re: How to Automount an External USB Hard Drive...

Thank you. I took a look at that and it seems as though it will be handy for a number of things. As far as I can tell though there is no change in what's listed whether the hard drive is on or off. When I do turn it on, it is recognized however, since it pops up a menu stating:

A new medium has been detected.
What do you want to do?

Medium Type: Unmounted Removable Medium.

With the options of:

Open in New Window
Download Photos with digiKam
Do Nothing

Regardless of which one I choose though, nothing much seems to happen. I have "mounted removable medium" set to display an icon in my desktop behavior, and it seems as though any other device works (such as audio CDs). My external hard drive is formatted to NTSF, since I store all of my media (music, videos, etc) on it and take it between partitions. That didn't seem to have any adverse effects when I was using Edgy though.

[dr.zoidberg]

Re: How to Automount an External USB Hard Drive...

Same problem here.
An external USB NTFS drive.
When I turn it on, a popup comes up asking... but nothing happens whatever I click.
I seem to have succeeded in a manual drive, but then I get a message
"...Don't have access rights". Even though I explicitly set in system settings that any user (after having tried "owner" and "current") can "manipulate" the drive.
Switched from windows to Edgy some time ago and all was just beautiful... but this?!?
There seems to be plenty of chatter here about this problem...
but so far I found no solution .
Thinking of coming back to...
edgy. 8)

Hoping for a patch soon...

[totoymola]

Re: How to Automount an External USB Hard Drive...

The program "pmount" does the mounting for us automatically. If it fails to automount an external drive, maybe there is something wrong with its communication to the system (try unplugging it and plugging it back in). The command "dmesg" tells us if the external drive is detected by the kernel. Mine says something like this:

james@casino-royale:~$ dmesg | grep sdb
[ 2413.061839] SCSI device sdb: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
[ 2413.062694] sdb: Write Protect is off
[ 2413.062699] sdb: Mode Sense: 86 0b 00 02
[ 2413.062702] sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
[ 2413.063564] SCSI device sdb: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
[ 2413.064457] sdb: Write Protect is off
[ 2413.064465] sdb: Mode Sense: 86 0b 00 02
[ 2413.064468] sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
[ 2413.064474] sdb: sdb2 < sdb5 sdb6 >
[ 2413.095176] sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sdb

The system calls my external drive "sdb". It can be different on others.

My two partition are detected as sdb5 and sdb6. To mount it, is use this:

$ pmount /dev/sdb5 partition1
$ pmount /dev/sdb6 partition2

This mounts the sdb5 to /media/parition1 and sdb6 to /media/parition2.

However, I am also having issues with the automounting. If I let it automount my drives, I noticed that some of the filenames in the drive are changed from upper case to lower case. I don't know why. It only happens when I let the system automount my drives.

[Morari]

Re: How to Automount an External USB Hard Drive...

Thank you, Totoymola. That did indeed get it mounted and working at least!

[Morari]

Re: How to Automount an External USB Hard Drive...

So... Now that it's mounted and working well, I have run into a new problem. It would seem as though it is set to read-only and I am lacking sufficient access to change this in properties.

[dr.zoidberg]

Re: How to Automount an External USB Hard Drive...

Ok... Found a similar kind of problem in many different places in this forum. People call it different names. But it seems to boil down to the automounting/handling of NTFS partitions.
This all seems hell lotta odd. Lots of suggestions to do this or try that.
But there was no such problems with Edgy (at least for me there were NO problems whatsoever!)

Just to make clear. The two partitions on my external drive get detected (sdb#).
I can even mount them manually (have not tried the pmount though, just "enable" in the system settings->drives and filesystems). But then they either appear as empty or I don't have access rights.... Again, no such a thing in Edgy even after installing KDE in Ubunutu.

PS.And now each time (even after restart) adept is complaining that some other application is using the database.... even though there is no process I can recognise as concerning the package managing...

[jspiers]

Re: How to Automount an External USB Hard Drive...

I'm having the same problem:

Automount of external usb ntfs harddrive worked fine in Edgy. Did a fresh install of Feisty, now I get the popup menu when I power up the device but no matter which I pick, the device isn't mounted. Both manual "mount" and automatic "pmount" work, but it's annoying not having the automatic mount.

I hope this gets fixed soon...

J

[dr.zoidberg]

Re: How to Automount an External USB Hard Drive...

So pmount works perfect. Was trying to make some kind of clickable executable script with the mount commands in it... but dunno how (I know what commands should be in it). Could anybody drop a line? I know this is perhaps not the place here... but still, would be nice