KDE only halfway automounts my external hard drive
 

Hello.

I have done some searching on this forum and others, but I haven't been able to find a solution, so here goes:

I am using Fedora 8 and KDE. KDE is less than happy about mounting my external USB hard drive automatically. It detects the drive fine enough, and places a nice "My Book" icon on the desktop. But the problem is that until I click this icon, no other application can read the drive. Which means that both KTorrent and aMule start up with an error message, because they need to write to the external hard drive.

As soon as I click the "My Book" icon and open it in Konqueror, the drive mounts and everything works. But needless to say, it's annoying to have to manually click the icon at every boot, and have to deal with error messages from programs.

The behaviour is the same regardless of whether the drive is connected at boot or get connected later.

Can anyone help: How can I make it mount my USB drive automatically?

(BTW, the drive mounts perfectly fine in Gnome.)

Thanks in advance. :)

You could try this:

Mount the drive as you described. Then examine /etc/mtab to see how it has been mounted and create an entry in /etc/fstab.

It will look similar to this:

/dev/sdc1 /media/usb0 vfat noauto,user,rw,noexec,sync 0 0

which happens to be my pen drive mount, which is automounted without any fuss when I insert it.

Thanks, I'll try that. :)


EDIT: Hm, if I do that it still won't mount without my clicking the icon, and on top of that, when I click the icon I get "permissions denied". :(

The line I added to fstab looks like this:

/dev/sdb1 /externalb vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,uhelper=hal,flush,uid=500,utf8,shortname=lower 0 0

Any more help? Thanks in advance.


EDIT 2: On a side note, the icon on my desktop leads to the address "media:/sdb1", which looks somewhat strange to me. Is this information useful?