usb external hard drive won't automount

[Default User]

On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 09:34 -0400, Roby wrote:
> Default User wrote:
> 
> > Hello!
> > 
> > I got a 120 gb Maxtor OneTouch III mini edition usb external hard drive
> > to use to backup my Ubuntu 7.04 laptop. It came partitioned and
> > formatted with an NTFS filesystem.  It automounted fine,
> > as /media/sdb1.
> > 
> > Then I zeroed it out by doing:
> > sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb
> > 
> > Then I partitioned it using cfdisk thus:
> > 
> >                                  cfdisk 2.12r
> > 
> >                               Disk Drive: /dev/sdb
> >                        Size: 120034123776 bytes, 120.0 GB
> >              Heads: 255   Sectors per Track: 63   Cylinders: 14593
> > 
> >     Name        Flags      Part Type  FS Type      [Label]   Size (MB)
> > 
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >     sdb1        Boot        Primary   Linux ext3             120031.52
> > 
> > 
> > Then I formatted it:
> > sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
> > 
> > Finally, I labeled it:
> > sudo e2label /dev/sdb1 backup
> > 
> > (Strange - now when I view the disk in cfdisk, the [label] field is
> > empty . . . )
> > 
> > Now the drive won't automount.  But it can be mounted manually as:
> > sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /mnt
> > and I was able to backup my Ubuntu system using gparted from the Gparted
> > live cd.
> > 
> > And a usb flash drive still automounts just fine. So why won't the usb
> > external hard drive? Has anyone else run into this or something
> > similar?
> My usb hd's (both formatted ext3) do show volume labels under cfdisk. I set
> them up using tune2fs.  Both automount fine, whether they are mentioned in
> fstab or not.  If your fstab has an old record indicating /dev/sdb1 is ntfs,
> automount would fail but you could still manually mount to ext3.
> 
> Try sudo /lib/udev/vol_id /dev/sdb1 to see if the volume label is really
> there.
> 
> Or just sacrifice a goat to the udev god.
> 
> 

I relabeled it with e2label. This time the label "stayed" (good dog!).
The drive works fine. And it automounts on another computer running
Debian 4.0 and Ubuntu 7.04. There are no stray entries in /etc/fstab. I
suspect that on this computer, when I first attached the drive, some
sort of filesystem id information was written to the computer. After
repartitioning and reformatting the drive, that info was no longer
valid. But the automount system was too retarded to adjust to the new
drive status, or even regurgitate an error message.  And judging from
the list messages, I am not the only one having problems with
automounting on Ubuntu, especially usb drives.