Comment 8 for bug 132349

I found what seems to be the problem, thanks to bug #131107. gparted creates the file:

/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/gparted-disable-automount.fdi

which stops any drives from automounting.

I removed the file and restarted hal with "sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart" but this didn't have any effect; but after I rebooted completely, my drives now automount.

Normally gparted deletes the file when it exits. I assume that (a) because gparted crashed, it didn't delete the file; (b) originally when I was rebooting, the file was flagged each time for deletion upon exit, so it didn't persist, and after reboot the drives mounted; but at some point the file became persistent and this broke automounting.

Although gparted needs to stop drives from automounting (eg see bug #37768 and its duplicates), it's a bit dangerous to allow a file that disables all automounting to persist through reboots. To the end user, it just looks like automounting is broken.