Configuration tool for formatting and mounting hard drives?

[Martin Alderson]

Hi all,

Firstly thanks for Hoary. Fantastic distro!

My request would be some sort of integrated tool to mount and format new 
HDDs.

I was slightly disappointed when I put a new hard drive in this computer 
only to find that Ubuntu didn't do anything when it found it. I was hoping 
that it would notice it and help me set it up, at least in a console mode.

To install it I had to apt-get gparted which was fantastic for formatting 
it. Great program.

The main problem arisen when it was time to mount it. I made a new folder 
for it (/Movies), and mounted it with the 'mount' command. Great - it all 
works. Start copying stuff to it and set downloads to it. A while passes and 
I reboot the computer for some reason, start it up again and suddenly I'm 
getting bombarded with disk space low errors - of course I had forgotten to 
add it to the fstab and I was downloading stuff to it, little did I realise 
that it wasn't mounted and it was quickly filling up my 'other' hdd. I added 
it to the fstab and all was well, but to a newer user this would of been a 
nightmare and if I didn't know what fstab was it would be likely that I 
would of assumed that the hard drive had died or something.

So what do I suggest?

Firstly a message at startup that a new hard drive has been detected. I 
don't think it's a good idea to try and set it up while in startup as the 
console isn't great for portioning and to many it is scary.

Secondly, a program similar to Windows XP's 'disk management console'. I 
think this is a pretty excellent way to do it, one program for portioning, 
formatting and mounting hard drives. This would make it easy to format the 
hard drive, mount it and add it to the fstab. I hope most of the people on 
this list agrees that it's no acceptable to have users edit the fstab if 
they add a new hard drive. 


Ok, while reading this I notice that a hard drive icon has been added to the 
'computer' in GNOME and when I click it it says 'cannot mount disk drive'. 
Is it likely that this would do what I asked for and I either didn't notice 
it (if so, it needs to be made more obvious) or I had to partition the hdd 
first (if so, then a simple to use partition tool is needed, gparted for 
example, but with a different name). I still think a disk management console 
would be good though.
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