Fixed disk marked as removable

[stan]

On Wed, 9 Sep 2009 10:52:11 +0100
Derek Cramer <cramerd at gmail.com> wrote:

> Does anyone know of a way to achieve this via HAL/gnome-mount? I have
> one machine on which I have to mount various partitions after a
> reboot, whereas on others, once they've been mounted once via Gnome,
> they will be mounted for subsequent sessions. I looked in gconf, but
> can't see anything relevant.
>

Don't know beans about gnome-mount, but here's some questions. Maybe
they will trigger something for you.

>From man gnome-mount

...
PRIVILEGES
       gnome-mount  is  intended  for unprivileged users and HAL ultimately controls if
       the calling user is allowed to mount, unmount or eject volumes as well  as  what
       mount  options  are valid. As such, requests may be denied. See the (human read-
       able) exception returned from HAL for details if a request fails.

       Note that HAL has a notion of what mount options are valid for a  given  volume.
       They  are  listed  in  the HAL property volume.mount.valid_options on the device
       object representing the volume to mount. Consult lshal(1) for details. Also note
       that  HAL  by  default appends the options nosuid and nodev to prevent privilege
       escalation.

       In addition to using HAL  as  the  mechanism  for  mounting  file  systems,  the
       /etc/fstab  file  is  also consulted as HAL will refuse to mount any file system
       listed in this file as it would violate system policy.  If  this  is  the  case,
       gnome-mount  will  invoke  mount(1) as the calling user rather than invoking the
       Mount method on the org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume interface  on  the  device
       object  representing  the volume / drive. This means that settings (mount point,
       mount options, file system type) read by gnome-mount are  not  passed  along  as
       these are already specified in the /etc/fstab file and there are no mechanism to
       override them. When parsing the /etc/fstab file, gnome-mount (and also  HAL  for
       that  matter)  resolves  symbolic  links  and also respects the LABEL= and UUID=
       notations. For example, if this line is in /etc/fstab

        LABEL=MyVolume /mnt/myvolume auto user,defaults 0 0

       then gnome-mount mounts the file system with the label MyVolume via mount(1) and
       /etc/fstab rather than using the HAL mechanisms.
...
 
This implies that if the mounts aren't occurring, there is an error, and
HAL puts out a human readable error message.  I'm not sure where that
would be.  Maybe do a grep for HAL in /var/log/gdm/?

Are there differences in lshal output between the systems where this
works and the system where it doesn't?

Why not just put the partitions in /etc/fstab if you always want them
mounted, and bypass HAL?  Do you need some specific functionality that
HAL provides?