usb external hard drive won't automount

[Roby]

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.