Problems after power cut, Naulitlus and auto-mount
 

Running a more or less default 12.04 there was a power cut. After booting it appears to be working normally apart from two (possibly related) problems.

The first is that the left side of the Nautilus Window no longer shows external drives, downloads directory, music directory etc. I can access these items by clicking the bookmarks menu at the top of the screen. It still shows the home directory and file system.

The second problem is that the second hdd and external drives are no longer automatically mounted. They work fine when manually mounted.

My guess is that a config or system script file somewhere has corrupted but I don't know how to start troubleshooting

Bad form to answer my own question but I just found that View/Sidebar will restore the missing items on the left. That just leaves the more serious problem of automount.