[How-To] Enable Auto-Mounting of External Drives In openSUSE 11


Due to weird-ass PolicyKit rules, you may not be able to mount external drives – such as USB Hard drives, Pen drives, or other mass storage drives. while the drive gets recognised, on trying to mount you’ll end up with this error:

org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable no <– (action, result)

This is because of a PolicyKit rule, which prevents external media from being mounted. To get around this, you’ll have to edit the policy. So first open the terminal. Switch to root by typing

su root

Next, open the PolicyKit config file corresponding to Storage. This file is located at

/usr/share/PolicyKit/policy/org.freedesktop.hal.storage.policy

Open this file for editing, by typing
kate /usr/share/PolicyKit/policy/org.freedesktop.hal.storage.policy
Next, search for this section

<action id="org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable">
<description>Mount file systems from external drives.</description>
<message>System policy prevents mounting external media</message>
<defaults>
<allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>
</defaults>
</action>

And replace it with

<action id="org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-removable">
<description>Mount file systems from external drives.</description>
<message>System policy prevents mounting external media</message>
<defaults>
<allow_inactive>yes</allow_inactive>
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>
</defaults>
</action>

Save the file, and then restart the HAL subsystem by typing

rchal restart

From now on, your external drives should be mounted with full access.

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