I made the mistake of pulling out a usb thumb drive while it was still mounted (the icon was behind a window). Since then automounting cdroms and usbdrives does not work not show a desktop icon. The kernel seems to recognize the devices. I have restarted rc.messagebus, rc.udev and rc.hald. I have reinstalled hal, dbus dbus + glib, dbus +qt and udev. I even went so far as to reinstall xfce. I am a member of the plugdev and power groups.

Is there anything I'm missing?

Thanks in advance

Hi shepper, Assuming you've rebooted the machine, you may also need to be in the cdrom, floppy, audio, and video groups. You may also find something useful here.

If you can provide more info, dmesg, logs, errors, etc. We may be able to assist further.
Good luck. ;-)

No, he doesn't need to be in any of those groups to have automounting work.

My guess is that either messagebus crashed due to something unrelated, or there's some stuff here we're not being told... like the user has only been trying that same thumbdrive and is simply assuming that automounting doesn't work for other media. I am pretty sure that a really corrupted filesystem on something might cause both these issues.

I'd say reboot, and then take a look at whether the filesystem on that thumbdrive is broken to the point where mount refuses to touch it without an fsck being performed first.

It was a new install and I am away from the offending machine until monday. Actually since the rebuild I may never find out what went wrong.
A corrupt file system on the usb drive may be a possibility but cdroms were also affected. The usb drives would mount on another Slack12 system. (I was transferring some slackbuilds).

In any event I just reinstalled the system and it seems to be working. I did review dmesg and saw the usb drive recognized by the kernel and was able to manually mount it (mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb).

The sticky on HAL and Slackware 12 has swelled up to 12 pages. I read the initial 3 pages and skimmed over the rest. I will try reformating the thumb drives. Thanks

The important stuff is in the first post - I've since edited it to add the things that need to be there. Of course, if I missed something, feel free to let me know.