Removable Devices

I had trouble with this in the fedora core 7 days (i.e. removable devices just never worked right), but it all seems fine now with core 8. Here are some things to look at that might make this work.

First off all, assuming you are running gnome, go to either:

System->Preferences>Removable Drives and Media
System->Preferences>Hardware->Removable Drives and Media

Then make sure the appropriate checkboxes are checked, I check the first 3.

When doing the above, you may get a message that says:

Volume management not supported.
The "hald" service is required but not currently running.

If this is the case, you are getting closer to solving the problem, do:

ps -aux
service haldaemon restart
ps -aux

The first "ps" above revealed some goofy hald related processes, that I found it worthwhile to use "kill" to eliminate (the restart did not flush them out, and they indicated they were holding locks to my CD drive among other things).

Some other things that may be worth a look in getting this to go:

chkconfig --list | grep autofs
chkconfig --list | grep messagebus
lshal

Both of the above should show 5:on or you are in trouble, service will start/restart either one. Also make sure you don't have permissions on /media screwed up, since the automounting scheme wants to dynamically create directories for mount points here. On a working system, this is owned by root with drwxr-xr-x permissions.

Good Luck!

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]