# Mount usb drives as normal user

## telebabbo

Hi all

iis there another way to let normal user mount/umount usb drives WITHOUT  /etc/fstab editing?

The /etc/fstab way it's kinda weird, you have to keep calm and remember /dev/sd*'s order before you plug your three or four usb drives...

thank you

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## roarinelk

most DEs (KDE/Gnome) can do that automatically for you; if you use something else give sys-apps/pmount a try.

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## Veldrin

there is pmount, and there is a similar functionality in (at least) kde and gnome, which allows you to mount removable devices to /media/<devicename>.

HTH

V.

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## pigiron

Another vote for sys-apps/pmount.

As far as /etc/fstab goes, if you have some specific USB drives that you always want to mount on a specific mount point, try using a UUID or LABEL in the first fstab field if their filesystem supports them. I've got a little server with nothing but USB thumbdrives for it's "disks" and this method works for me in keeping the correct boot order mounting.

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## telebabbo

Actually I had already installed pmount, I don't remember when and I don't remember why, but, this is strange:

in my /etc/fstab there was a line which mounted /dev/sdb1 in a certain directory, I removed it and now when I plug-in a usb drive my DE (lxde) alerts me and automount it!!   :Confused: 

I am very confused and I'm considering to make a fresh install to well learn  what happens.

Anyway, there is another ugly issue: a HFS+ drive.

I disabled journaling from Mac OS X, my linux box automounts it but only root can write; performing ls -l I noticed that file owner is "99" (?). if I chown my normal user recursively against entire HFS+ drive I can read and write with him, and I read and write from Mac OS X, but when in Mac OS X if I create new files or move mac files, on linux have the previous issue, files owned by "99"!

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## tclover

If you don't want automount and still be able to mount your removable media, you still can use udisks (+upower maybe, not sure anymore). You could follow ssuminen previous DE sticky post and get going. Basically you need udisks+a polkit rule (`/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/11-udisks.pkla' for me) to get going. You could [u]mount a plugged drive whenever you want it to be mounted using pcmanfm (left panel) or even automount--which you don't want.

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