Asking the user to mount a device

[Brennan Vincent]

Hello,

I have two partitions on my hard drive: one containing Ubuntu and the
other containing Vista. The Vista partition is called "OS". It is not
mounted on boot, but it appears in the Gnome "Places" menu. When
clicked, the user is asked to grant root privileges in order to mount
the device in the proper place (/media/OS).

My question is: what is the mechanism for this? How does the system
know which drives should be mounted where so that it can populate that
menu and mount them when the user tries to access? Where are the
relevant configuration files?

I ask because I would like to write a patch for Banshee that would try
to do a similar thing when songs in the music library can't be found
because the device they are on has not been mounted.

I'm sorry if this is a Gnome issue. I wasn't sure if it was an
Ubuntu-specific feature and I wasn't sure where to post.

Any suggestions are welcome.
Brennan Vincent