External SATA drives do not auto-mount

[Joel Ebel]

Binary package hint: policykit

When I attach an external SATA drive to ubuntu, I get the following error:

Failed to mount "460G Volume".
org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-fixed
auth_admin_keep_always <-- (action,result).

Presumably this is because the disk is seen as an internal fixed disk, but it's been hotplugged. I've guessed that this falls in the domain of policykit, but not being too familiar with policykit, I don't have much else to say. It's possible this is a known problem with no easy solution, but I'd certainly like to encourage more thinking of the issue, because drive enclosures with eSATA are fairly common, and the user experience is inconvenient compared to USB.

[Matthew Gatto (mattgatto)]

This bug is related to, if not a duplicate of, bug 153768.