Arch Linux

yannick555

Member

Registered: 2010-01-01

Posts: 14

hal 0.5.14-1 does not mount some usb drives correctly

Hi folks

When I try to mount a USB hard disk (with KDE 4.3.4), it tries to mount it at some wrong path used by another USB hard disk.  Or I have to mount it as root, or even as root it still doesn't work right... pfff I'm really disappointed by this showstopper...

For example, I own a LaCie hard disk (/media/disk), a Iomega one (/media/IOMEGA) and a LaCie mobile disk (no power cable, /media/MobileDisk):

- When I try to mount the Iomega one, it works fine, as normal user;
- When I try to mount the LaCie one, it fails, independently of the fact that the Iomega drive is mounted or not, with the following message:

Unable to run the command specified. The file or folder file:///media/IOMEGA does not exist.

Looks like it wants to mount the LaCie one where the Iomega one is/should be mounted...
- When I connect the LaCie hard disk, the directory /media/MobileDisk
is created, instead of /media/disk
, and when as root I try to manually mount the hard disk, it says:

ntfs-3g: Failed to access volume '/dev/sdb1': No such file or directory

Maybe there's some erroneous entry in some cache or data used by hal/dbus?  I don't know how they work and how to activate their logging systems and then where to find the logs...

Maybe there's a way to simply completely wipe out hal/dbus/consolekit/policykit/... configuration data without having to reinstall the complete system?

I have:
  hal 0.5.14-1
  dbus-core 1.2.16-1
  dbus 1.2.16-1
  dbus-glib 0.82-2
  dbus-python 0.83.0-2

I start KDM using /etc/inittab, as described in the wiki.  I've put "/usr/sbin/console-kit-daemon" in /etc/rc.local and have modified /etc/inittab so that it starts kdm with: "x:5:respawn:/usr/bin/ck-launch-session /usr/bin/kdm -nodaemon"! 
Is this the right setup, equivalent to the one with xinitrc?

The same setup works fine on my laptop.

I've got the impression that hal/dbus/... confounds my drives and does not know where to mount them...

Downgrading to hal 0.5.13-idontrememberwhatcifer does not solve the issue, the system is kept up to date with "pacman -Syu" about once a day and it still doesn't work...

Some clue?

Thanks and happy new year

jib2

Member

From: Paris, France

Registered: 2009-08-13

Posts: 95

Re: hal 0.5.14-1 does not mount some usb drives correctly

I always give my usb devices (disks, sticks...) a label so that they'll always be mounted under that name. Then there's no mix-up.
You could give it a try.

yannick555

Member

Registered: 2010-01-01

Posts: 14

Re: hal 0.5.14-1 does not mount some usb drives correctly

they have labels:
- IOMEGA for the IOmega one
- DISK for the LaCie one

Maybe I should try if it works after changing these labels...

yannick555

Member

Registered: 2010-01-01

Posts: 14

Re: hal 0.5.14-1 does not mount some usb drives correctly

I just changed the label "DISK" to "LaCie" and it still wants to mount on /media/MobileDisk... completely weird!

yannick555

Member

Registered: 2010-01-01

Posts: 14

Re: hal 0.5.14-1 does not mount some usb drives correctly

Obviously, even if only the LaCie hard disk is connected, HAL tries to mount it on /media/MobileDisk, thus there's evidence that HAL remembers of this mobile usb drive labelled MobileDisk.

Is there some way to completely reset these rememberings of previously connected drives by HAL?

yannick555

Member

Registered: 2010-01-01

Posts: 14

Re: hal 0.5.14-1 does not mount some usb drives correctly

I've just seen that DeviceKit is meant to replace HAL... If I have DeviceKit installed, do I still need HAL?  Could my issue be coming from this situation?

yannick555

Member

Registered: 2010-01-01

Posts: 14

Re: hal 0.5.14-1 does not mount some usb drives correctly

OK something happened that I can't explain...

I just controlled about all files related to hal/dbus/mounting etc and, I don't know why, all devices I've mounted had a corresponding line in fstab... really weird.

I juste deleted those lines, and, well, mounting seems to work again

So this issue is solved

And finally Arch Linux is again my favorite distro

Last edited by yannick555 (2010-01-03 14:37:55)