Hi.. I've used SUSE for quite sometime. When I installed it on my laptop, it mounted all my ntfs drives automatically. Then my friends took the same dvd and installed it in their systems. For some of them, there was no problem with mounting. But others faced this problem. SuSE dint mount the drives. They had to do it manually.

Why this problem? What makes it mount on some systems but not on others?

Check their /etc/fstab files, and make sure the lines marking the drives they want to automatically mount, don't have "noauto" in the options space.

Example:

Thank you very much. Will look into that. But the bigger doubt is: Why is this auto-mounting limited to only some systems and not other systems? On what does this auto-mounting depend on?

No idea. The only way, I can think of, that could have changed whether or not Windows shares mount automatically or not, would have been anything your constituents may have done during install. I've never installed - or run - SuSE before, and I'm not sure how the installer looks or works or any of the options presented during.

The only way to guarantee a symmetric install across multiple systems is to do it yourself.

What kind of drive is this?

Having an explicit entry in /etc/fstab can interfere with auto mounting. I will mount nfs shares under /mnt using an /etc/fstab entry, but for external drives I will let them auto mount. I did have a problem with a drive not mounting yesterday. The problem was that the "kmediamanager" service wasn't running for some reason. I started it in the run command, and then I could open the drive icon that was on the desktop.

FYI, I am using the KDE desktop. NFS mounts don't behave well if they are mounted under /media. The udev/hal system my try to delete the directory, or it may end up being mounted twice. When I mount an NFS directory, I'll have an NFS icon change to mounted on the desktop. I enabled this in "Configure Desktop" -> Behavior -> "Device Icons".

If their drives have device nodes assigned in /dev/, including /dev/disk/by-id/ for example, then the hal/udev system is probably working and the problem may have to do with the desktop (kde or gnome) helper programs.

Running "dmesg" | tail might indicate a problem mounting a filesystem.

Thanx a lot for ur replies. Will look into the respective folders and files and try figuring out a solution. Thank you.

No problem.