How to Auto Mount/unmount [solved]

[bilyo]

I recently purchased a 1.5 TB USB desktop HD. I plugged it into my PCLOS laptop and Nautilus immediately listed and mounted the ntfs (windows) formatted drive.  I then used gparted on the PartedMagic boot disk to reduce the Windows partition to 1/2 the drive and add an ext4 partition and a mount point for PCLOS.  The windows partition is now sdb1 and the ext4 partition is sdb2.  When I plug the drive into a usb port, the sdb1 partition is automatically mounted (as indicated in Nautilus) but I must manually mount sdb2.  I have been trying to research what to do to make sdb2 auto mount also.  I have found some information regarding "Autofs" and "Supermount".  I haven't yet tried to do anything with this information.  Since sdb1, the CDROM, thumb drives, etc, are automatically mounted, it appears to me that the necessary software is already there to do this.  I'm guessing there is just some tweaking I need to do. Can someone advise me on this?
BTW, the gparted work took over 20 hours to complete.  Is this normal on an HD of this size?

[and then..]

Hello bilyo.
Did you look in System Settings> Hardware> Removable Devices?
Cages

[bilyo]

Darkages,
I can't find the exact path you suggested. I've looked all through the list of admin and preferences tools and all through PCLOS Control Center.  I'm using Gnome. Does that make a difference?

Having said that, I just discovered that the problem was a permissions issue.  When logging on as root, it would auto mount. I changed the group permission and it now auto mounts when logging in under my user name as well. For some reason, this isn't necessary for the windows partition. I had a sense that it was something simple. It just didn't click until I had a good nights sleep.

Any comment on the time it took gparted to do it's thing?

Thanks

[and then..]

I then used gparted on the PartedMagic boot disk to reduce the Windows partition to 1/2 the drive and add an ext4 partition and a mount point for PCLOS.

Any comment on the time it took gparted to do it's thing?

bilyo,
Did you do a low level format (check for errors) when creating the new partition? That can be slow..
I would have wiped all on the 1.5TB (GParted>Device>Create Partition Table)and created new partitions as required.
>Cages

[Bald Brick]

Darkages,
I can't find the exact path you suggested. I've looked all through the list of admin and preferences tools and all through PCLOS Control Center.  I'm using Gnome. Does that make a difference?

It does. System Settings is the KDE Control Center ("Configure Your Desktop"). But the main thing is that you found a fix.

Having said that, I just discovered that the problem was a permissions issue.  When logging on as root, it would auto mount. I changed the group permission and it now auto mounts when logging in under my user name as well. For some reason, this isn't necessary for the windows partition. I had a sense that it was something simple. It just didn't click until I had a good nights sleep.

Any comment on the time it took gparted to do it's thing?

Thanks

[YouCanToo]

Darkages,
I can't find the exact path you suggested. I've looked all through the list of admin and preferences tools and all through PCLOS Control Center.  I'm using Gnome. Does that make a difference?

Having said that, I just discovered that the problem was a permissions issue.  When logging on as root, it would auto mount. I changed the group permission and it now auto mounts when logging in under my user name as well. For some reason, this isn't necessary for the windows partition. I had a sense that it was something simple. It just didn't click until I had a good nights sleep.

Any comment on the time it took gparted to do it's thing?

Thanks

He means open the KDE Control Center click on Hardware and than on Removable Devices. Check and see if the Enable automatic mounting of removable media is checked.

[Bald Brick]

Darkages,
I can't find the exact path you suggested. I've looked all through the list of admin and preferences tools and all through PCLOS Control Center.  I'm using Gnome. Does that make a difference?

Having said that, I just discovered that the problem was a permissions issue.  When logging on as root, it would auto mount. I changed the group permission and it now auto mounts when logging in under my user name as well. For some reason, this isn't necessary for the windows partition. I had a sense that it was something simple. It just didn't click until I had a good nights sleep.

Any comment on the time it took gparted to do it's thing?

Thanks

He means open the KDE Control Center click on Hardware and than on Removable Devices. Check and see if the Enable automatic mounting of removable media is checked.

The problem was that bilyo wasn't running KDE....

[bilyo]

Yes. I did have the formatting process check for errors.  As I recall (and I didn't check the time precisely), the majority of the time was used reconfiguring the windows partition.  Formatting the new partition did not take long.

In hindsight, it probably would have been better to have wiped it clean and repartitioned from scratch.  However, having done this sort of thing in the past with different software, moving and resizing an existing partition went fairly quickly.  As they say, hindsight is 20/20.

Anyway, it is now working and I appreciate all the comments and suggestions.  Now. I've got some serious backing up work to do.

Bilyo

[bilyo]

I thought I fixed it!  At boot up, if I log in as root, it auto mounts for everyone so that if I then switch to my user name it is mounted. However, if at bootup, I log in under my user name, it does not auto mount. If I plug it in while logged in under my user name, I get a message that says: "Cannot mount volume. You are not privileged to mount the volume".  I tried changing owner and giving my user group rw privileges.  Still no go. In the Control Center, under Authentications, I think I gave my user name authority to mount/unmount external drives.  Still no go. Apparently I'm just not doing something correctly.  Any suggestions other that switching to KDE (I may do that eventually)?  
Thanks

PS 7/5/11
I finally found out that the default options for this device in fstab included "nouser".  I changed that to "user" and it now works as it should.
Thanks