Friday, February 20, 2009

Disabling Automounting HDD Aartitions in GNOME

I have a multiple Linux distros installed on my PC. And each of them has its own /boot partition. The most used Linux is Mandriva 2009.
It seems to me that things went wrong after I played a bit with gparted in Mandriva, but I'm not 100% sure. Anyway for unknown reason GNOME started mounting all partitions on the hard drive on my login.
Not only this slows down the login time. This is also really annoying. In a Linux world when you like OS to mount some partition you simply edit /etc/fstab. And when the Linux is messing you up it starts to stink like Windows...
The core problem is for sure in user settings in GNOME because it neither happens for other users nor for other desktop environments.
Playing with a GNOME Configuration Editor did not helped :(
I even started to consider to switch desktop environment to xfce. But after some more googling and reading man pages for fstab and mount I finally found the solution.
I simply added a following line for each partition I like to be not mounted:
/dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2 ext3 noauto,nouser 0 0
And it works! :)