Automagical mounting no longer working

[CB]

On Tue, 2004-12-28 at 08:24 +1000, CB wrote:
> 
> I'm also interested in this as I my external firewire drive certainly
> doesn't mount itself. In fact I had no idea it was supposed to: I've
> always just manually mounted it when needed.
> 
> Can anyone point to any references to how this is supposed to work,
what
> if anything configures it, etc?
> 
> 

After a moment's research, I ran pmount against my external drive
('pmount /dev/sda1'), then pumount. I switched the drive off, and back
on, and lo and behold, it was then mounted under /media, *without* me
having to run pmount. 

Does running pmount the first time do something special?