Automounting Issues
This is just a small tidbit, in good part for my own future reference, on what I’ve been spending the last number of hours figuring out. I’ve actually done a lot of configuration of my new Gentoo install I wish I’d documented now, but alas, it’s too late.
In any case, I have two hard drives in this machine, and none of them were mounting automatically on my shiny new GNOME desktop. I thought it was a problem with NTFS, then with the gnome-volume-manager. I spent a bunch of time verifying I had the right drivers (ntfs-3g) and the latest software installed. Turns out I found my solution in an unlikely place: the Arch Linux wiki. Anywho, the fix was to change around some policy setting. A one-liner fix, as so many of them seem to be in the end. *sigh*
In order to make this experience even more exciting, I decided I’d try and use the same file and configurations to have HAL ignore /dev/sda1, which is my Acer recovery partition. I don’t particularly want to see that from Linux, and I certainly don’t want to mount it in case I accidentally end up doing something horrible to it. I came across this blog post, and adapted its instructions like so (for the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-ntfs3g.fdi) by adding the following section:
<device>
<match key="block.device" string="/dev/sda1">
<merge key="volume.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
</match>
</device>
Much to my surprise, it worked! (after I changed my bleary-eyed mistake of “/dev/hda” to “/dev/sda1″ 
).
I probably should make a point of posting some more of these gems, and where I found their solutions. If it takes me more than 20 minutes to find them, it can’t be all that easy to find. In any case, I’d say this is a job well done!
