Bugzilla – Bug 447932
KDE 4 has no automount option for external USB hard drives
Last modified: 2009-04-20 16:00:07 UTC
in Opensuse 11.0 using KDE 4 my external USB hard drive is not automounted. The drive is visible in Dolphin but needs to be clicked on to mount the device. If I try to locate the external drive in an application (such as K3B) before first mounting it in Dolphin the drive is not visible. In KDE 3.5.x you could right click on the device icon, select the mount tab and select "automount". Can't seem to locate any such option in KDE 4 issue is discussed in forum http://forums.opensuse.org/hardware/394952-automounting-11-kde4.html googling the problem brings up many people with the same issue.
It's a deliberate policy change from KDE 3 (automount) to KDE 4 (mount on demand), because with automount and multiple logins, all sessions race to mount the volume. leading to the "Huh, why can't I write my USB disk - oh, i started a new session and my wife's KDE session mounted it first" scenario. Instead you have 'mount on demand' so you should be able to cause the device to mount from any app where you need to access it. Unfortunately, KDE 3 apps like k3b don't know anything about the new 'mount on demand' policy. You should use the New Device Notifier that pops up on plug to mount the usb disk, then it will be visible in k3b's filedialog. It's a little clumsy but we don't have a better solution from upstream - it would require rewriting kde3's file dialog to detect when it is running in a KDE 4 session and request a mount via HAL as Solid does in KDE 4.
I'm reopening because this issue also affects removable media in general, e.g. DVD and CD mounts and ejects. I'm also rasing the priority because: 1) There are several reports of people banging their head over this 2) Mount and eject are common tasks 3) I think I have a potential fix that just needs to be applied The KDE4 device notifier correctly indicates the 'last plugged in device'. This the mount point of this device is shown correctly in Dolphin for example. HOWEVER, trying to open the device yields the behavior the OP mentions in comment #6 and #10 of the thread provided by the OP: Briefly the OP _may_ have seen the following error message at the bottom of Dolphin (this error needs to also go to /var/log/messages): org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.PermissionDeniedByPolicy: hal-storage-mount-removable-extra-options no ← (action, result) to confirm openSUSE shipd with the wrong policy, run the follwoing as the user having problems: # polkit-auth There should be no output. The solution is to run as root: # sudo polkit-auth --grant org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable --user <user_name> # sudo polkit-auth --grant org.freedesktop.hal.storage.eject --user <user_name> Again run the following as the user having problems: # polkit-auth There should be: org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable org.freedesktop.hal.storage.eject Now the behavior the OP was expecting should be possible. This solution I think would be a _precursor_ to fixing Bug #383176 which was marked as duplicate of Bug #434114 and Bug #407537 ?
. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 494160 ***