Linux install in Virtualbox broken by authoritarian automount behaviour

[Cefn]

Binary package hint: nautilus

I have been trying to install Lucid as a Guest OS onto to an SD card using Virtualbox-OSE running on Lucid as the Host OS. I've been doing it over and over and it failed each time.

I believe I've found the problem and it's the automount behaviour from Gnome/Nautilus.

After the Lucid installer in Virtualbox has completed formatting and unmounting the filesystem, and before it writes the grub information and reboots, Gnome/Nautilus steps in and automounts the SD card, killing the install process in Virtualbox, which throws an error like "error mounting filesystem, daemon is inhibited".

This behaviour makes the final installation (which took several hours each time) unbootable, since it never gets to finish the install.

Can anyone provide information of how to turn this behaviour off in the host OS using a graphical tool, or a workaround using config files. I've tried very many things but none of them seem to apply to Lucid. It proceeds to helpfully remount the card whenever I put it back in (which is I think equivalent to the reappearance of the filesystem after reformatting in the guest OS).

I believe people who author helpful automated behaviours, whatever they are, should be REQUIRED to provide a straightforward way to turn them off, as they seem to create almost as many problems as they solve, and it's a fraction of the work to provide an off button.

Interestingly, the only partition which I DO want automounted is never automounted on boot - my windows partition which contains my music :( However I suspect boot time mounting is a different question.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: nautilus 1:2.30.1-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-22.34~kms1-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-22-generic i686
NonfreeKernelModules: wl
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon May 31 09:49:50 2010
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_GB.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nautilus

[Cefn (6-launchpad-net-cefn-com)]

An example of something I've tried to prevent this automount behaviour is to add a line like this to /etc/fstab...
/dev/mmcblk1p1 /mnt/ ext3 noauto 0 0
which places the mount point outside of /media and flags it as noauto.

Both of these were alleged in previous versions to be the magic formula for communicating DO NOT MOUNT to the automount behaviour, instead of the checkbox I'm yearning for.

[Cefn (6-launchpad-net-cefn-com)]

Although there are a million solutions offered out there for alternate linux and ubuntu builds which do not work on Lucid, I have good news. Lucid does indeed have a CHECKBOX!

Hit Alt+F2 and then type gconf-editor
Navigate to /apps/nautilus/preferences/media_automount
Uncheck the box.

This is a perfectly good answer for me, although it might be useful for more complex setups to be able to control this on a per device basis, and I don't know how to do this.

Well done to the authors of this behaviour. Once I'd traced it to nautilus I should have done a more comprehensive search of the gconf-editor for some kind of control. Stupidly I didn't include 'key names' in the gconf-editor Find I did for the word 'mount'. When I got this right the checkbox magically appeared.