Drive Mount Applet

This is version 0.9 of the Drive Mount manual.

Table of Contents
Drive Mount Applet

Drive Mount Applet

Drive Mount Applet, shown in , allows you to quickly and easily mount and unmount various types of drives and filesystems on your computer. To add this applet to a Panel, right-click on the Panel and choose + + + +Panel+ + + + + ->Add to panel+ + + + + ->Applet+ + + + + ->Utility+ + + + + ->Drive Mount+ + + + .

Figure 1. Drive Mount Applet

Background Information for Beginners: Many filesystems on Linux and Unix systems must be manually mounted and unmounted. After a filesystem is mounted, you can read and write to it. When you are finished with a filesystem, you should unmount it. It is important to unmount removable drives, such as floppy disks and Zip disks, before removing the media, because Linux and Unix systems do not always write the changes made immediately. They typically buffer the changes made to the disk in order to improve the speed of the system. Partitions on fixed drives, such as your hard drive, are typically mounted automatically when your computer boots and unmounted when it shuts down. Removable media must be mounted and unmounted by hand, such as by using Drive Mount applet.

Usage

To mount or unmount a drive, simply click on the Drive Mount Applet icon with the left mouse button. For drives which can eject their media, such as most CDROM's and JAZ drives, you can eject the drive by clicking on the icon with the right mouse button and selecting Eject. To browse the contents of the drive with the GNOME File Manager, select Browse.

If you right-click on the applet, it brings up a menu, containing the following commands:

  • About shows info about the Drive Mount Applet, inluding version and author's name.

  • Help brings up this document.

  • Browse showse the contents of the drive using the GNOME File Manager. The drive must be mounted for this to work.

  • Eject ejects the storage medium for drives which can be ejected, such as CDROM's and JAZ drives.

  • Properties brings up Properties dialog

The mount status and mount point of a drive is shown in a tooltip if the cursor is left over the applet for a short time, as shown in .

Figure 2. Drive Mount Applet showing tooltip

Customization

You can customize Drive Mount Applet by right-clicking on it and choosing Properties. This will open the Properties dialog(shown in ), which allows you to change various settings.

Figure 3. Properties dialog

The properties are as follows:

  • Mount Point This is the mount point used when mounting the drive. If you are unfamiliar with mount points, this is an empty directory which will hold the contents of the drive whenever the drive is mounted. Mount points can occur anywhere in your filesystem, but the convention is to put all mount points for removable drives in the /mnt directory.

  • Update in seconds This is the interval in seconds at which Drive Mount refreshes its icon by checking with the mount status. This is only important if you sometimes mount or unmount a drive using a command or application besides Drive Mount sometimes.

  • Icon This determines the icons (one for unmounted and one for mounted) displayed for the drive. There are icon sets for most of the commonly used drives(floppy, CDROM, Zip, hard disk, and JAZ). They are shown in . You may also select Custom; this allows you to specify your own icons.

    Figure 4. Icons for Mounted and Unmounted Drives of Various Types

    Notice that shows the icons for the unmounted and mounted states of (from left to right) floppy, CDROM, Zip, JAZ, and hard disk drives.

  • Custom icon for mounted A custom icon which is displayed when the drive is mounted. This option is only available if the Icon: selection is set to "Custom".

  • Custom icon for not mounted A custom icon which is displayed when the drive is not mounted. This option is only available if the Icon: selection is set to "Custom".

  • Scale size to panel Selecting this option scales the size of the mounted and unmounted icons with the Panel's size. If this option is not set the icon sizes are fixed, independent of the size of the Panel. Selecting this option typically makes for a nicer appearance. For very small Panel sizes, unselecting this option may be useful, as it forces the applet to appear rotated and larger, which makes it easier to see.

  • Use automount friendly status test Select this option if you use automount, otherwise leave it unselected.

    Information for Advanced Users: The default method used by Drive Mountto test whether a drive is mounted (using stat) would cause the drive to actually be mounted if the user is using automount. The reason this button is not de-selected by default is because the alternative method uses the mount command, which is more cpu intensive.

After you made all the choices you want, click on OK to make the changes and close the Properties dialog. To cancel the changes and return to previous values, click the Cancel button.

Configuring Your System

In order for Drive Mount Applet to work properly, the system must be properly configured by somebody with root access. ...

Note For Advanced Users: Drive Mounting Configuration: Information describing the mount point and filesystem type of each drive is kept in /etc/fstab. This can be configured by hand or by using the linuxconf application. For drives which do not always have a single filesystem type (such as a floppy drive which may have msdos or ext2 filesystems), you should use "auto" for the filesystem type.

Error Messages

If you do not have your system configured properly, you may encounter certain error messages when trying to mount or access certain drives. Here are some of the more common error messages and their causes:

  • "mount: the kernel does not recognize /dev/sda4 as a block device(maybe 'insmod driver'?)" blah blah

  • "mount: only root can mount /dev/fda on /mnt/floppy" blah blah

  • "mount: /dev/fd0 is not a valid block device" blah blah (no floppy in drive)

  • "mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/cdrom, or too many mounted file systems" blah blah (could be a music cd instead of a data cd) (could be the wrong format of disk or drive)

  • "mount: /dev/fd0 already mounted or /mnt/floppy busy mount: according to mtab, /dev/fd0 is mounted on /mnt/floppy_ext2 " blah blah (two mount points for one device)

  • "umount: /mnt/floppy is not mounted (according to mtab) " blah blah (could be that the mount point does not exist)

Known bugs and limitations

Eject doesn't do anything (Add section for error messages) (add tooltips discussion) (can't eject while mounted) (this is bug - give error when one tries to eject while mounted) (ejecting doesn't work for me)

Authors

This applet was writen by John Ellis . To submit suggestions and bug reports, use The GNOME Bug Tracking System or the bug-buddy utility in the Main Menu.