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Yesterday, I received my new shiny external hard drive so I can run some VM Ware appliances. (Lucky me). I happen to be the developer who runs “that linux” at work. So I plugged in the drive to fire up the images and BAM no love. Ubuntu auto-mounted the drive no-problem so why could I not fire up the image? Ahh no permissions no problem a quick chmod on the drive, wait nope. Checked the auto-mout parameters DOH! it’s an NTFS drive. Changed the mount point and the umask so I could do all this. Did this using the GUI right-click properties on the mounted drive. I thought this would work since the ntfs3-g package was installed. This package lets you read and write NTFS file systems (as long as it’s not in a suspended state!).

Unplugged the drive, plugged it back in. No go the auto-mount could not mount. I had placed a trailing “/” on the mount point. Now here is where everything went nuts. Where does that meta data about the drive get stored? After much searching and much frustration I narrowed down the search results to: “mount_point cannot contain the following characters: newline, G_DIR_SEPERATOR (usually /)” found the bug over on the Bug .

You have to change the keys. Here is the relevant key location : “/system/storage/volumes/_org_freedesktop_Hal_devices_voume_uuid_*/mount_point” I launched the gconf-editor as the user I originally mounted the drive with. Do not launch with root or you will never find it. I deleted the key and remounted no problem!

The good folks over at Ubuntu have a patch in the works but until then I hope this helps the search results for others.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 12:36 pm and is filed under development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.