h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The problem is that when I added a partition (hdb2) on my hard drive to
the fstab file a new icon titled "media" appeared on my desktop. I am
sure this is a wonderful idea for removable hard drives it is not what
I want for a partition on permanently installed internal hard drive.

So how do I safely get rid of this icon?


My "fstab"
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
#
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hdb9 /home ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hdb7 /opt ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hdb2 /music ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hdb4 /tmp ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hdb5 /usr ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hdb6 /var ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hdb8 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hdd /media/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

A screen shot, if your not sure about the icon I'm talking about can
be found at http://peter.tynan.googlepages.com/11sep2007.png

Traveller in Time running USB sticks and USB hard disks on Debian etch
"I am sure it is not a 'kernel' issue, I have to manually mount umount removable devices.
Are you sure there is no service interfering with removable media ?

If so, it should be found somewhere in /etc/rc . . . "

I have no removable media attached to this PC (unless you count the floppy drives) - I will be attaching removable media from time to time so I don't want to totally disable stuff but I would like Gnome (and I think it's a Gnome issue) that hdb2 is not removable media.

Problem is I'm new to Gnome so I'm having to figure this out as I go

Well, the culprit would be Nautilus, but I'm not sure how you'd get rid of it. I've long since ignored most of what's on my desktop anyway, so any icons it decides to create for mount points listed in fstab generally get ignored right along with them.

I like to keep a clean desktop hence the annoyance...

still, I'll figure it out eventually

YAY®

This works

Go to the folder

/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor

and open the file

20-storage-methods.fdi

in a text editor, then scroll down to where you find



<!-- Here follow volumes we specifically want to ignore - it is the -->
<!-- responsibility of software higher in the stack (e.g. gnome-vfs) -->
<!-- amd mount programs (e.g. Mount() on HAL) to respect volume.ignore -->
false



and somewhere in that section add the drive you are trying to hide - in my case I added

<!-- hdb2 -->

true


true


(a bit belt and braces but it worked)