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This is a problem I don’t think I ever would have solved if not for a combination of caffeine and tattoo pain that kept me up all night. Context: I have a nice new external usb hard drive I decided to use for backups. It worked great with Ubuntu right up until the time that I realized that I was never going to be able to use the truly slick rsnapshot unless I was backing up to a drive that was something fancier than VFAT. So I partitioned it and formatted it ext3 and even gave it a volume label and then ubuntu stopped mounting it automagically when I plugged it in.

Why was ubuntu not mounting my ext3 usb external drive?

The first thing I did was add a line to /etc/fstab

LABEL=bookbak /media/bookbak ext3 defaults,user,auto 0 0

Now when I typed “mount /media/bookbak” or “mount -a” it worked like a charm. Also dmesg looked great when I plugged in the device. But it still wouldn’t mount it when I plugged it in. Hmmm…so I went online and found a million unhelpful forum entries. And one helpful one, which explained (and I paraphrase here) that there’s a whole load of funky crap going on with automatic mounting but that the thing that finally really does the mounting is a program called “gnome-volume-manager”. And then I discovered if you do something like this:

killall gnome-volume-manager
gnome-volume-manager -n

You can see what happens when your device gets plugged in. And from that I discovered an error message to the effect of “volume.ignore set to true”. And then, using another helpful blog post I can no longer find I looked here /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/20-storage-methods.fdi and saw this:

false

true


true



false

And that gave me the inspiration to change my fstab entry to this:

LABEL=bookbak /media/bookbak ext3 defaults,user,noauto 0 0

And that worked. So yes, turns out if you want your external usb hard disks to be mounted automatically, you have to set noauto. I imagine this makes complete sense, auto no doubt referring to drives that are supposed to be mounted at boot time etc. Anyways, somewhat uninitive on the surface.