I have Manjaro Xfce on my laptop.
There are 4 partitions on my hard drive: sda1, sda2, sda3, and sda4. (please see the screenshot from Gparted where they are shown). Sda3 is a swap partition. Sda2 is where a previous version of Manjaro is located but currently it’s not used (I just use it to find older files I may need). Sda1 is NTFS formatted and empty right now. The current Manjaro is installed on sda4.
Until today, when I would opet File Manager (Thunar), I would always see the two other partitions displayed on the left side-bar, under “Devices”. Their size was also always shown in Gigabytes.
However, as of today (and for no apparent reason), I see a completely different thing under Devices. I see only “File system” and “Filesystem root”. So there is no way to select and easily mount the other partitions just by clicking them in Thunar.
I know that there is an old DVD drive in my laptop which is kind of broken and failing at the moment, so perhaps it managed to confuse Thunar somehow… I am not sure. Today I only tried to install Stellarium via Pamac but even after I removed it, Thunar still doesn’t display the other partitions correctly.
Those other partitions are still present and can be accessed, but they are not visible in Thunar’s left side-bar.
I encountered the same situation briefly about a month ago when I used Double Commander, it seemed to confuse Thunar and disable displaying of partitions, but that strange behavior stopped when I would restart the system and not use Double Commander.
Does anyone know what might have happened here and how to fix it?
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a device; this may
# be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices that works even if
# disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
UUID=ed58f94b-8baf-4074-8cfb-a20f14b571b9 / ext4 defaults,noatime,x-gvfs-show 0 1
UUID=318051e3-f93a-4cff-8090-f0fb5ab64bab swap swap defaults,noatime,x-gvf-show 0 0
By the way, I tried to re-install the gvfs package in terminal even though it appeared to be already installed. I typed this:
sudo pacman -S gvfs
and after restarting my laptop, now Thunar again displays the partitions in its left side-bar as it always had in the past. However, when I go to the Thunar root and look at the Advanced options, the warning about the missing gvfs package is still there.
So it seems that this computer is still having some problems and things are still quite flaky… each and every system booting is different and some unknown factor can mess things up seemingly randomly (but doesn’t always). Could the failing DVD drive be the culprit?
Unfortunately, I am unable to update the BIOS because it can only be updated from the Windows environment and I don’t have Win on this laptop (one of the really stupid decisions by Dell to support BIOS update only on Win).
Furthermore, even if I installed Windows, it would still not allow me to update BIOS because the battery on this laptop is not working, and the BIOS update utility from Dell doesn’t want to proceed in that case.
I can try with a more recent kernel, actually it’s already installed and I used it for some time, but it seems to be much more memory demanding than the one I am using now (my laptop has only 4 Gb RAM), so I keep returning to this older kernel as it is so much faster.
What I noticed on my Thunar is this, open thunar as normal user then access the other drive/fs/whatever then open thunar as root and they should show up as they didn’t on mine until I as suggested.
