I have been at this problem for six hours and it is really starting to p**s me off.

I cannot mount any drives (USB or fixed). Whenever I try and load them using the Dolphin file manager I get the response:

for a USB drive or the following for a seperate drive/partition:

I have googled it and it seems to say that hal is restricting permissions, however no matter what fix I attempt (mainly editing PolicyKit.conf) I get the same message over and over again.

ps just to avoid confusion I am using an Arch 64 bit distro with a KDE 4.3 graphical environment.

I can't believe this, all this time wasted!!!!!

I got an example of a PolicyKit.conf file online and I noticed in mine that there were two lines </config> not one, so after deleting the rogue line this fix worked: