Automounting usb memory in Xfce. SOLVED

[DavidMcCann]

I've set the Removable Drives and Media options in Xfce to mount storage on plug-in, but it simply ignores a usb memory stick. Is that a bug or a feature?

I've altered fstab to mount /dev/sdb on /media/usb, so I can mount by hand, but it does seem more like 2001 than 2011.

PS
All of a sudden, the problem has solved itself

[gapan]

You shouldn't use fstab for removable drives. Remove that entry you added. Everything should work as it is. Does the drive appear in thunar when it is plugged in? Does the drive get mounted if you click on it in thunar? The output of dmesg right after you plug your drive will probably show you if there is any trouble reading it.

[EaglePrince]

Actually, I found (with Salix64) that the icon for the removable drive appears, but commoners cannot open it, only root can. The only way I could get this to work for regular users was to create a mount point and put an entry in fstab. If you are worried about security, fstab allows you to specify which user(s) can mount removable drives.

In your case, David, I suspect that the device is not using /dev/sdb. As gapan said, you can check this from dmesg just after plugging it in. In my case it was using /dev/sba2 which surprised me a bit.

[thenktor]

Actually, I found (with Salix64) that the icon for the removable drive appears, but commoners cannot open it, only root can. The only way I could get this to work for regular users was to create a mount point and put an entry in fstab. If you are worried about security, fstab allows you to specify which user(s) can mount removable drives.

With such fstab entries the file manager will fail to mount the device. Remove them and everything should work without problems for normal users.

[DavidMcCann]

I've removed the fstab entry, inserted the memory, and run dmesg. This is what I get

usb 1-6: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
usb 1-6: New USB device found, idVendor=18a5, idProduct=0304
usb 1-6: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 1-6: Product: STORE N GO
usb 1-6: Manufacturer: Verbatim
usb 1-6: SerialNumber: 441553214392ac
scsi4 : usb-storage 1-6:1.0
scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access Verbatim STORE N GO 0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] 7845888 512-byte logical blocks: (4.01 GB/3.74 GiB)
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sdb: unknown partition table
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

The only thing I can think of is that whatever does the automounting doesn't like the fact that the device was formated (ext2) without partitioning. I can't think of anything else. It's odd that I've never had this problem with any other distro, though. Well, I'm not taking all the data off it and reformating, so I'll just have to stick with mounting it the old-fashioned way.