How to auto mount disk drives in gnome-shell?

Question

I have 1 usb disk and 1 esata disk plugged in my pc. When I log in gnome-shell the usb one is mounted automatically. Is there any way to mount the esata disk too, without modifying fstab?

Answer 1

No. The system assumes that sata disks are internal, and therefore, does not auto mount them if they don't have an fstab entry. Is there a reason you don't want to add an fstab entry?

Answer 2

A better and easier way to do that in Gnome3.4 (with Gnome-Shell) is using the GNOME Disk Utility. I had to go for that because Ubuntu did not like de AriOS package (warning said it's bad software) and the pySDM is not that clear about the partitions. I always get confused trying to remember wich one is /sda1 or /sda3 or what so ever. It should show the labels! The Gnome Disk Utility is really great. You can find it at Activities > Aplications > System Tools > Disks (sorry, not sure 'cos I'm using the brazilian-portuguese translation).

Tks!

For my brazilian fellows now: A melhor opção é usar o aplicativo Discos do Gnome (gnome-shell). Vá em Atividades > Aplicativos > Ferramentas de Sistema > Discos. Clique na partição e no ícone de configurações abaixo dela. Lá, desative a montagem automática e escolha a opção LABEL no último menu, pois essa opção monta a partição com o nome (label) que você deu para ela no Windows.

Answer 3

There is a system service (man udisks(7)) that handle a mounting jobs in cooperation with udev. You can write udev rule to mark your esata disk as external and partitions on disk as automountable. Something like that:

KERNEL=="sd[b-z]", SUBSYSTEM=="block", SUBSYSTEMS!="usb", ENV{UDISKS_SYSTEM_INTERNAL}="0"
KERNEL=="sd[b-z][1-9]", SUBSYSTEM=="block", SUBSYSTEMS!="usb", ENV{UDISKS_AUTOMOUNT_HINT}="always"

To play around with this, try udisks console tool with --mount, --unmount, & --monitor options.

It works for me on Ubuntu 12.04.1 GNOME3 Fallback session