USB external drives not auto-mounting

Until a couple of updates back (approx two-three weeks) Manjaro automatically mounted a hot-plugged USB drive or device - eg a 1Tb external drive or an MP3 player - and showed it in Thunar. As soon as they were plugged in I could go to Thunar, click on the drive/device name, and it would give a contents listing. I can no longer do this.

There are several ways to mount the drive/device but the one I use now is to open Disks (gnome-disk-utility 42.0), select the item and click Mount. The drive/device is then displayed in Thunar and I can proceed from there.

That is easy enough to do but I would prefer the hot-plug mounting to work again.

I originally had “Mount removable drives when hot-plugged” enabled in Removable Drives and Media settings. Since the failure I have also enabled “Mount removable media when inserted”, although I don’t think this is relevant and it wasn’t enabled before; anyway, it made no difference. The same items are enabled in Thunar’s Advanced/Configure panel. I can find nowhere else to enforc hot-plugging.

Can anyone help, please?

Anything related to your system or that drive happened in between?
Do you have an explicit mount configuration for that drive?

No change to the system, merely downloaded and installed the latest update. Rebooted after a few days (reluctantly - it takes about an hour to set everything up as I like it after a reboot). Four days ago the machine froze (it does from time to time) and I rebooted again - I’d downloaded the latest update a day or so before that. Still the same drive/device situation.

Two of the drives (8Tb) have entries in fstab and are permanently connected (additional data drives) and always used to turn up in Thunar after a reboot. Two other drives (1Tb) are unaffected. (IE all four drives should be and used to be present after a reboot).

The MP3 player (small personal device) always came up in Thunar as soon as plugged in plus, from time to time, various 1 or 2 TB drives, and various USB sticks likewise. None of this happens now apart from the above-mentioned two 1Tb drives.

After writing the original posting I checked on the mount points of the various “fixed” devices. The two that came up still had their original mount points as /mnt/disklabel with the identity of /dev/disk/by-label/disklabel but the two 8Tb drives had reverted to their by-id identity and mount point, which was not as previous. The fstab entry for the 8Tb drives is typically…

/dev/disk/by-label/Mars /run/media/dave/Mars auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0

…which is the original by-label definition not, as the actual disk now is, by-id. Somehow the drive spec has been altered.

This still does not account for the hot-plugging situation, though.

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If those were affected by the auto-mount failure, it might be a side effect of mounting them through gnome-disk-utility. Though, despite it being also a front-end for fstab, i wouldn’t have expected it to alter it simply by asking a mount…


The following documentation may be relevant to your issue.

Auto-mounting with udisks

This is the easiest and most frequently used method. It is used by many desktop environments, but can be used separately too.

See Udisks for detailed information, including list of mount helpers.
USB storage devices - ArchWiki

Thanks for the links but not, I think, too relevant. I’m trying to discover why hot-plugging suddenly failed after several years of working correctly. I think the 8Tb drive non-mounting is a side effect of that.

I now have hot-plug and the 8Tb drives mounted at boot!

I do not know if it had an effect but yesterday afternoon I re-installed volman. There was no immediate effect and I still do not know if that was what fixed it.

Soon afterwards I had to reboot Manjaro (the Falkon web browser froze the complete system - again!). Following reboot I had both 8Tb drives showing in Thunar again. I hot-plugged the MP3 player this morning and that also showed up in Thunar.

Thanks for your suggestions and advice. Appreciated! :slight_smile:

I found the same (similar?) problem after patching to the latest stable release earlier today (I hadn’t applied updates for about 4 weeks prior to that). I had two internal partitions of my SSD that were not automatically mounting on system start. I fixed the problem by going into Settings - Removable Storage - Removable Devices, and adding a tick next to them for “on login”. After booting and logging in they now mount properly.

This also applied to plugging in USB drives on a running system. That was fixed by ticking the “on attach” for them.