How to disable automount of an harddrive?

Question

I am working on a project, and for this I need to disable the aumounting of hard-drives in Ubuntu both at startup and when I plug an hard-drive.

I tried one solution with "edit-conf" disabling automount at org.gnome.desktop.media-handling but when I plug a hardrive ubuntu still mounts it an open a window even when I restart the computer in between.

There is also the fstab solution but the thing is I don't know in advance the UUID of the drive I don't want to mount automatically.

From want I understand there is the solution of editing an udev rule, but i'm not a specialist of that.

Answer 1

Run these two commands:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.media-handling automount 'false'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.media-handling automount-open 'false'

Or you can try it with a udev rule:
sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/85-no-automount.rule
Paste this line SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{UDISKS_AUTO}="0" and save the file.
Reboot the system.

Answer 2

You can try to add the module to the blacklist:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

add:

blacklist usb-storage

or

echo "blacklist usb-storage" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Enabling it later should just be:

sudo modprobe usb-storage

Answer 3

As Pabi wrote in his answer, run this command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.media-handling automount 'false'

BUT: this will probably not be effective until the next reboot.

Lack of a reboot caused me to doubt the effectiveness of gsettings initially. I found it when being very thorough in preparation for filing a bug, which I found I didn't need to do. I've only tried this under sudo, however, so if you still have trouble, try doing it that way. I want this effective system-wide and found this does the job.

You do not need to touch automount-open because it only applies when an automount happens, and you will have disabled that.