I understand that removable partitions are supposed to automount without being in fstab. However, sdb2 did not and when I made the change in fstab it did and still does. I'm sure there is a better way to do it.
Best illustration I can make is with my USB thumb drive. It has two separate partitions on it, labelled as Voyager and XFER. In the screenshot below, you can see that both partitions show on the desktop and in Nautilus.
my fstab file only shows mount points for sda1 and sda2.
[darrel@localhost ~]$ cat /etc/fstab
# Entry for
/dev/sda2 :
UUID=c0fb58ed-dc02-451f-a006-fbf0683fb73c / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
# Entry for
/dev/sda1 :
UUID=74511595-7305-4c39-9c83-8baa67dba609 swap swap defaults 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0
[darrel@localhost ~]$
But, with the USB thumb drive plugged in, there are mount points for sdb1 and sdb2 that are not in my fstab file.
[darrel@localhost ~]$ cat /proc/mounts
rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0
/dev/root / ext3 rw,relatime,errors=continue,user_xattr,barrier=0,data=ordered 0 0
/dev /dev devtmpfs rw,relatime,size=253008k,nr_inodes=63252,mode=755 0 0
/proc /proc proc rw,relatime 0 0
/sys /sys sysfs rw,relatime 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts rw,relatime,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs rw,relatime 0 0
fusectl /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw,relatime 0 0
none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,relatime 0 0
/proc/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw,relatime,devgid=43,devmode=664 0 0
gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/darrel/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=500,group_id=500 0 0
/dev/sdb2 /media/XFER ext3 rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,user_xattr,acl,barrier=0,data=ordered 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /media/Voyager ext3 rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,user_xattr,acl,barrier=0,data=ordered 0 0
[darrel@localhost ~]$
I realize the illustrations don't help your present situation, except to point out that
all removable media partitions
should show up in Nautilus, if the partitions are readable. So, let's see if we can find out why yours are not acting correctly.
Boot from your PCLinuxOS partition, open a terminal and post the results of the following. (You need root privileges to see the output).
su
fdisk -l
exitfdisk -l (dash lowercase L) will simply list all partitions. Don't attempt to make any changes.
Later, I tried to boot up and log in under my user name and I got a series of error messages regarding $Home/.dmrc being ignored, not able to update ICEauthority, problem with configuration server, and unable to create /home/myuser/desktop.
This is most likely an ownership issue, but let's find out what's going on with the partitions first.
EDIT: There are several versions of PCLinuxOS CDs. Which one, specifically, did you install from, and where did you download the iso from?
