Nautilus Seeing Double [Solved]

[bilyo]

Here is screen shot of Nautilus without external drive plugged in:



Note that the properties window indicates that it is empty.  Permissions indicates root is the owner.

Sorry about the ls -lR /media command. I thought the l was an I.  Anyway, I ran it again and it scrolled for about 30-40 seconds; way past the 512 line limit set for the terminal window.  All the information in the last 512 lines pertains to Windows.  Please let me know if there is a way to get to the preceding lines.  Perhaps I can run it again with a higher line limit and then post just the info regarding ElementsPCLOS.  Would that work?

[djohnston]

Sorry about the ls -lR /media command.

That's okay. I might have misread it, too, and entered what you did. Some of the stuff I'm asking you to enter may look like gobbledygook to you, anyway. Let me just cut to the chase and explain what it is I'm looking for with all these questions.

At some point, you had to have created subdirectories in the /media directory in order to have mount points to mount your devices from your customized fstab file. Let's take one step at a time to get this fixed. So, what you, personally, need to do is browse your /media directory without any external hard drives attached, without any CDs or DVDs inserted, and without even any floppy disks inserted, if you happen to have a floppy drive. Only then can you be sure that what you are looking at in the /media directory is stuff that is permanently written there. Once you have determined what has been written there, you need to move that data and those folders to a more fitting area. Your home partition would be a good start. But, it's your data, and only you can determine where to move it to.

The reason you want to do this is that /media is designed as a Linux directory where the contents of removable drives and CDs and DVDs and floppies are temporarily stored within the file system, so that you can access what is on those external hard drives, optical disks and floppies. Once all the removable volumes have been removed, the /media directory should be completely empty. That's part of where you're running into problems now.

For example, if you have a DVD drive and you open a terminal and enter:

ls -l /dev/cdrom                     you should see:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 May 20 22:47 /dev/cdrom -> sr0

If you enter:

ls -l /dev/dvd                         you should see:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 May 20 22:47 /dev/dvd -> sr0

See a pattern here? sr0 is the physical device known as a CD/DVDROM or CD/DVDRW, also known as a "coffee cup holder".  mmmm, coffee  /dev/cdrom and /dev/dvd are actually links to the physical sr0 device. When you insert a CD or DVD, the /sbin/udev daemon process, running in the background, automatically creates a subdirectory in /media and mounts the CD or DVD according to which one it is. Once that CD or DVD is ejected, the /media subdirectory that /sbin/udev created is erased. It was just a "bookmark" or "placeholder" for storing the real data written on one of your removable volumes.

What bothers me is that in one of your screenshots, supposedly with no optical disk in the drive, /media/cdrom shows 2 items. If there really is no optical disk in the drive, there should be no /media/cdrom directory. This is why you need to start, with no removable media inserted, (including removable hard drives), to separate the wheat from the chaff. So, this is step one of the process, you determining what has been inadvertantly written to the /media subdirectories, and moving it somewhere else.

Once step one has been accomplished, which only you can do, we'll move on the Windows partitions, then, finally, to your kernel installation issues. Capiche?

[bilyo]

OK. Just clarify:
We know what the CDROM is
Win7 is the first partition on the internal HD
Win7Data is the second partition on the internal HD
ElementsWin7 is the first partition on the external HD (USB port)
ElementsPCLOS is the second partition on the external HD
The only other external (USB) item I have is a Bluetooth dongle for my mouse

The last screen shot I posted was with the external HD disconnected and no disk in the CDROM drive. So, the /media directory should be empty. Right?

I'm sure it is no surprise that both Win7 and Win7Data give the opportunity (right click) to unmount them and when I do, they go away (until the next bootup if it goes as in the past).  For what it may be worth, I notice that just before they go away the folder symbol next to them changes to what is shown for ElementsPCLOS in the screen shot.

Where do we go from here?

[djohnston]

Win7 is the first partition on the internal HD
Win7Data is the second partition on the internal HD

The last screen shot I posted was with the external HD disconnected and no disk in the CDROM drive. So, the /media directory should be empty. Right?

Aha! Glad you caught that, because I did overlook it. However, you will know your data and equipment better than I as you are looking at it. The first question with the internal hard drive, then is do you want to be able to read and write to those sda Windows partitions, or just read from them, or possibly ignore them altogether? I had forgotten that NTFS partitions are so easily handled by Linux now.

[bilyo]

I have no real need to access Win7 or Win7Data.  If I have a need in the future I can always mount them manually. I've done some searching around to find a way to not have them automounted.  There seems to be different opinions on how to do it and all very confusing.  The only thing I want automounted is ElementsPCLOS and CDROM of course.

[djohnston]

Okay, not a problem. It's been a long time since I used anything Windows related, so I wanted to be absolutely sure of the next steps. What I've done is fire up my trusty Zen Mini VM, attach a second hard drive to it, and formatted it with an NTFS partition spanning the drive. I can always resize and add more partitions, as it's basically blank, except for the test files I wrote to it. Basically I wanted to be sure of all the mount options. It's getting to be a long day for me, so I'm going to uncharacteristically hit the hay early tonight.

Boot your Gnome installation and install the following packages from Synaptic, if you haven't already done so.

ntfs-3g, ntfs-config, ntfsprogs and ntfsprogs-gnomevfs and any dependencies that are called to be installed

After you've done that, decide how you want to handle each partition from the Linux side, with Linux running. Do you want the partition mounted read-only or read-write? Do you want the partition mounted automatically at bootup or not? Obviously, your Linux root partition and home partitions are already taken care of, so we're only talking about the two data partitions on sdb, and the two NTFS partitions on sda. I'll look for your post tomorrow, and we can proceed from there.

[bilyo]

Only had to load ntfsprogs-gnomevfs.

Internal Drive:
sda1, Win7 - No need to mount
sda2, Win7Data - No strong need to mount.  If we go there, I think it should be read only. See below.

External Drive:
sdb1, ElementsWin7 - No need to mount
sdb2, ElementsPCLOS - Automount rw

I have read that it is not safe to write data from Linux to Windows. If that is true then mounting of Win7Data should be read only or not at all. If I need to exchange some data, I can do it via thumb drive. My first PCLOS install was a dual boot with Win XP. I think I crashed Windows by exchanging files back and forth.

[djohnston]

Okay, all that is fine. Before going further, just one more command to run. I want to be absolutely sure of which partitions have physical labels. Please post output of blkid from a terminal. (It's all lower case B-L-K-I-D) You do not need root access. I'm including your original fstab file below. Read it and see if it's still the same.

# Entry for /dev/sda3 :
UUID=9e65403b-ef54-4b33-a754-2d85492d49bc / ext4 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sda6 :
UUID=6f6f804f-6d38-42d0-854f-8f4edb0a82c1 /home ext4 defaults 1 2
# THE FOLLOWING LINE REVISED "OPTIONS" TO AUTOMOUNT /DEV/SDB2
# /dev/sdb2 /media/pclos ext4 defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb2 /media/ElementsPCLOS ext4 rw,suid,dev,exec,auto,user,sync 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
UUID=7c9519ab-95a2-4ccd-bb27-9d72ec428784 swap swap defaults 0 0

I believe the line /dev/sdb2 /media/ElementsPCLOS ext4 rw,suid,dev,exec,auto,user,sync 0 0 is now commented, isn't it?

[bilyo]

Results of blkid: (had to be su for it to work. Otherwise got "command not found")

 blkid
/dev/sda3: LABEL="root" UUID="8499ef8e-d8b0-408b-8238-6e202798120f" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda5: LABEL="Swap" UUID="94c393f9-234d-4515-9ad2-46538f747eea" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sda1: LABEL="Win7" UUID="3738EB9D793FB5E7" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda6: LABEL="home" UUID="6f6f804f-6d38-42d0-854f-8f4edb0a82c1" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda2: LABEL="Win7Data" UUID="6223E70562AA175C" TYPE="ntfs"

fstab is the same and the line you cited is commented.

Can you tell me a little about what we are doing?

[djohnston]

Can you tell me a little about what we are doing?

We're going to change your fstab entries. There are three ways to mount a partition from an fstab entry. Examples below.

# Entry for /dev/sda3 :
UUID=9e65403b-ef54-4b33-a754-2d85492d49bc / ext4 defaults 1 1

# Entry for /dev/sda3 :
/dev/sda3 / ext4 defaults 1 1

# Entry for /dev/sda3 :
LABEL=root / ext4 defaults 1 1

Personally, I don't like using the uuids. If you reformat a partition, the UUID# changes, and you have to make changes to your /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab entries. It's a PITA. Give me a few minutes to work on the changes.

[djohnston]

Results of blkid: (had to be su for it to work. Otherwise got "command not found")

Actually, you don't. I forgot the Gnome default install doesn't give a normal user a search path to /sbin. Almost there. We're missing the UUIDs for sdb partitions. One more time, as regular user:

/sbin/blkid | grep sdb2

[bilyo]

Here tis:

 /sbin/blkid | grep sdb2
/dev/sdb2: LABEL="ElementsPCLOS" UUID="f7d563e6-8e66-4a75-99dc-126734c0aea4" TYPE="ext4"

Again. Had to be su.

[djohnston]

Again. Had to be su.

Hmmm. I don't know what to say. It works on my recent Zen install. But, it's a moot point right now. I meant to ask for output of blkid for sdb, but asked for sdb2. That's okay. Looking through your past posts, I'm deducing that the label for partition sdb1 is ElementsWin7. We'll go with that.

Okay, here's the deal. udev is automounting those Windows partitions because there are no fstab mount points defined. We're going to change that. We will create a mount point for each NTFS partition, but not mount them at bootup. That way, udev will not mount them, and you can easily mount them manually. When you do mount an NTFS partition, it will be read-only, unless you change the fstab entries.

First, you're going to create the mount points. No mount points will be created in the /media directory. They will all be in the /mnt directory. Open a terminal and su to the root user account.

su
md /mnt/Win7
md /mnt/Win7Data
md /mnt/ElementsWin7

With the terminal still open, you're going to backup the current fstab.

cd /etc
cp fstab fstab.original
exit

The terminal is still open, but you've changed from the root user to the regular user. Due to some oddities with the Gnome environment, we need to open the text editor by using the following.

su -c "gedit /etc/fstab"

Delete all the text in the editor window. Copy the following text and paste it into the editor window. Save the file as fstab.

# Entry for /dev/sda3 :
LABEL=root / ext4 defaults 1 1
# Entry for /dev/sda6 :
LABEL=home /home ext4 defaults 1 2
LABEL=Swap swap swap defaults 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
# Following lines are user added for Windows partitions - no automount & readonly
#
# Entry for /dev/sda1 :
LABEL=Win7 /mnt/Win7 ntfs-3g noauto,ro 0 0
#
# Entry for /dev/sda2 :
LABEL=Win7Data /mnt/Win7Data ntfs-3g noauto,ro 0 0
#
# Entry for /dev/sdb1 :
LABEL=ElementsWin7 /mnt/ElementsWin7 noauto,ro 0 0

Close all open windows. Reboot and log in. You did clean up the media directory, didn't you?    The ElementsPCLOS should be the only partition showing on the desktop and in Nautilus, once you've plugged in the external drive. Tell me what you see.

[bilyo]

OK. Looks like all is working as it should.  Only ElementsPCLOS appears in /media when plugged in. It disappears when umounted.







Any idea what "loop" and "RESTORING" are in /mnt? Both are empty except for an empty subdirectory under RESTORING.

Anything else to do?

Can you explain what caused this problem in the first place? The only "happenings" just prior were; moving the whole system from old HD to new HD using rsync with Old-Polack's help (direction) and updating kernel at Old-Polack's suggestion.  Both went well. The prior changes to fstab were only to the "default" settings in the one line.

Just for the sake of information, if I decided to change the names of the external partitions again (not gonna do it), is changing the names accordingly in fstab and /mnt the only other thing I need to do ?

[djohnston]

Any idea what "loop" and "RESTORING" are in /mnt? Both are empty except for an empty subdirectory under RESTORING.

No, I really don't. /mnt/loop is dated April 21st, 2012, and contains 0 items. Was it not there before?

/mnt/RESTORING is dated February 17th, 2011, and contains 1 item. Are you sure it's empty?

Anything else to do?

Yes. I would say have a good look at the /mnt directory. Open your file browser as root user and look at both the /mnt/loop directory and the /mnt/RESTORING directory. Set your file browser to view hidden files. That RESTORING directory has something in it. You'll have to determine what it is. Both directories were created sometime in the past, but are not being used, unless you have a different fstab than what I've seen.

Can you explain what caused this problem in the first place?

I don't have first hand knowledge of what was done in the past. A look back at this post shows that something major went wrong, but I can't tell you how it happened. I wasn't there.

Just for the sake of information, if I decided to change the names of the external partitions again (not gonna do it), is changing the names accordingly in fstab and /mnt the only other thing I need to do ?

Post the contents of /boot/grub/menu.lst, and we'll have a look at that. You will need root privileges to view it. Also, are you still having any problems with that kernel update and with logging in as your regular user?