Xfce Forum

lostandfound

Member

Registered: 2008-03-14

Posts: 5

E-SATA removable drive doesn't appear on Desktop and Thunar

Hello community,

i'm running Arch Linux with XFCE version 4.6.1. When I plug a any kind of USB drive (USB pen drive or external USB HDD) to the connector, a new icon for a removable volume on the desktop appears and I can mount the drive by double clicking or "Mount Volume" in the context menu.

Now I have got a new e-sata drive and it doesn't appear on the desktop. I can mount it and unmount it via commandline, and write on it, but it never appears on desktop or in Thunar.
How can I change this?

Thanks in advance!

Snood

Member

Registered: 2009-05-02

Posts: 56

Re: E-SATA removable drive doesn't appear on Desktop and Thunar

I've been dealing with a similar situation for some time. I have a notebook computer with a removable drive bay. I switch between having a DVD writer and a second hard drive in that bay. I haven't used any Linux distro yet that recognizes that removable HD as a removable drive. I have found three ways to deal with this:

1. Add a line to /etc/fstab using the noauto option so that the hard drive gets mounted when it is present.
2. If pmount is installed on the system, then adding a line with the device name to /etc/pmount.allow. This allows you to mount the drive manually as a regular user. (I could be wrong, but I'm guessing this is the one you want.)
3. Just say to heck with it and use root to mount the danged thing manually every time you start the system.

I've used all of the above methods successfully with Debian Lenny 5.01. For some reason my stubborn nature requires me to use #3. I don't hot-swap the drives in that bay because I don't trust that it's safe to do so under this environment.