Unable to make XFCE "automount" a particular external hard drive.

ReaperX7 · 05-19-2014, 11:56 AM

Fairly much any USB, eSATA, or IEEE1394 drive unless its a drive used for boot and permanent storage purposes.

frankbell · 05-19-2014, 09:48 PM

The USB drives I put in my fstab are used for storage purposes. For all practical purposes, they are little more than extensions of the local machine.

Other items, such as my podplayer and my camera, I let udev handle.

STDOUBT · 05-23-2014, 11:04 PM

frankbell,

Quote:

Try replacing defaults with rw,user,auto as shown, without any spaces.

rw= "read/write"; user="user can mount/access"; auto="automount" Those settings work on my system.

I used:[/code]/dev/sdb1 /media/WDMyPassport exfat rw,user,auto 0 0[/code]
and while Thunar showed the device, it gave:

Code:

"Failed to mount "WDMyPassport".
ERROR: failed to open `/dev/sdb1' in read-write mode.
ERROR: failed to open `/dev/sdb1' in read-only mode.
.

after clicking on it.

I think I'm coming to the conclusion that unprivileged mounts just can't happen with this filesystem.
From http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#unprivileged:

Code:

Unprivileged block device mounts work only if all the below requirements are met:

    ntfs-3g is compiled with integrated FUSE support
    the ntfs-3g binary is at least version 1.2506
    the ntfs-3g binary is set to setuid-root
    the user has access right to the volume
    the user has access right to the mount point

I don't know how to really check this stuff...(unless I'm completely off-base and a partition with HPFS/NTFS/EXFAT has nothing to do with ntfs-3g)
Going to live with teaching my user to mount manually using sudo (which works great).
Thanks for all the suggestions, people!

Richard Cranium · 05-24-2014, 12:32 PM

Ah, part of the problem is that those passport drives aren't exactly standard external USB drives. They are pretty much built to work with Windows boxes and not much else.

You can wipe them, IIRC, and they'll act like normal external USB drives. We had some of those at work and they behave in a rather funky fashion. (I'll also admit that I only used Windows XP/Windows 7 to access them since that's what I am forced to use at work.)