Arch Linux

Opifex

Member

Registered: 2020-05-11

Posts: 13

How to access other hard drives in my system?

Hi,

I have several hard drives and SSD's in my computer, and am wondering how I can access those from inside a file browser such as Thunar in the same way as it works in Nautilus on Ubuntu: you go to "Other locations", all of them are listed, and once you click on any of those it gets mounted and opened.

I do see all available hard drives in Thunar on Arch, but clicking them has no effect. Right clicking gives me the option to Mount, but trying this gives me the error "Failed to mount: Not authorized to perform operation".
Googling gives me several other people with this issue, and each of these forumposts is answered by refering to the wiki-page of fstab. Reading this page already makes me scratch my head... This doesn't sound like it does what I need? (I.e. auto mount the drives available)

I gave it a shot nonetheless. I added all my drives into the /etc/fstab/ file and rebooted. Now all the drive bookmarks in Thunar are gone! The are not visible anymore. I can however browse to the mountpoints specified in the fstab file, but once there I cannot access the folders. It says permission denied.
I can access the folders when I open a terminal as root, but ofcourse that's not the ideal situation...

Anyone who can guide this newbie to how I can get the wanted behaviour? (The Ubuntu behaviour)
Forgive me for using the wrong terminology, but I simply do not know it. Feel free to correct me

Thanks in advance!

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,759

Re: How to access other hard drives in my system?

If you want the same behaviour as nautilus, install nautilus, if you want to approximate this in thunar read:  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Th … me_Manager and you probably also want to install gvfs and relevant partner modules depending on the type of filesystems.

Last edited by V1del (2020-05-11 19:03:21)

Opifex

Member

Registered: 2020-05-11

Posts: 13

Re: How to access other hard drives in my system?

I wouldn't say that I want identical behaviour to Nautilus, but I would still like to be able to access my drives from inside Thunar. Which I can't right now.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,759

Re: How to access other hard drives in my system?

Well yes install these opt depends. And maybe look at the output of

pacman -Qi thunar

to see what else you might miss.

Opifex

Member

Registered: 2020-05-11

Posts: 13

Re: How to access other hard drives in my system?

I tried installing gvfs, but apparently I already had it installed. I read that gvfs supported udisk mounting, so I also tried installing that, but again, already had it installed.
Is there something I need to configure in order to get it to work?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,759

Re: How to access other hard drives in my system?

Do you still have them in your fstab? Most automount tools won't show them anymore if they are explicitly handled in the fstab. Also potentially, read the link I posted. FWIW how do you log in/start your session? For authorization to be granted/asked for you need to have a polkit agent running.

Last edited by V1del (2020-05-11 20:58:28)

Opifex

Member

Registered: 2020-05-11

Posts: 13

Re: How to access other hard drives in my system?

Aha! The missing polkit was the issue!
I'm using Openbox with LightDM-greeter-gtk to log in.

After installing the polkit and rebooting I was able to access all my ext4 harddrives. Thanks a lot for this!

Only the NTFS drives I wasn't able to access yet. The first time clicking them it asked me for a password. I entered it, but it didn't do much. When I manually click mount on these drives now, it gives me an error that says "wrong fs type, bad option, bad super block on xxxx, missing codepage or helper program or other error".

I'm guessing this is because Thunar thinks it's ext4, while it actually is ntfs. Any clue how I can fix this? (even though this is an entirely different problem than the initial question of the thread was.)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,759

Re: How to access other hard drives in my system?

You need an out of kernel driver for ntfs read write access: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NTFS-3G

Opifex

Member

Registered: 2020-05-11

Posts: 13

Re: How to access other hard drives in my system?

Thanks a lot V1del! That worked like a charm!

Thanks for teaching this Newb some new tricks