Mounting external drives

Introduction
As most operating systems, Linux has an auto-mount feature to detect and mount external drives. The aim of this article is to provide an easy generic way to auto-mount hard-drives when plugged.

Without desktop dependencies
Use this method if you want your drives to be mounted even if you do not have a running X Server. This method avoids having dependencies other than hal, udev and dbus. udev is part of gentoo's standard installation instructions so it should be already there.

Emerge ivman:

Start hald at boot-time:

Now add your user to the plugdev group (you have to logout and login for this to take effect)

And finally start ivman automatically by adding it to your .bashrc file

Check-out ivman for a ivman specific article.

Using a desktop environment
Use those methods preferably if you have already one of those desktop managers installed as it pulls in a lot of dependencies.

Gnome
Using gnome-volume-manager:

Gnome will launch it automatically at startup but if you are using another desktop environment you will need to add the following line to your .xinitrc file before the last line :

This will launch it in background before starting your

Xfce
Using thunar-volman

will launch it automatically at startup but if you are using another desktop environment you will need to add the following line to your .xinitrc file before the last line :

Complementary notes
- If your drives filesystem is NTFS if you will need to have a look at the NTFS-3G article

Wechselmedien mounten