[SOLVED] Hard Drive Icon

[kromaz]

Hello,

When mounting USB hard drives I'd like to get the icon just like the file system. When I plug in a flash drive I get that icon in Thunar with the eject button next to it. Why is this different when attaching a USB hard drive? Only way i can access the drive is to go to the folder I set the mount (/media). Is there some setting I'm missing, are USB hard drives consider removable media in Linux? Would be nice to have icon placed on desktop too. Hope I explained this right... Thanks

[jaderiver]

Go to MintMenu > Applications > Preferences > Desktop Settings > then, click on Mounted Volumes.

Hope these steps work for you.

jaderiver

[kromaz]

Go to MintMenu > Applications > Preferences > Desktop Settings > then, click on Mounted Volumes.

Hope these steps work for you.

jaderiver

These are my settings. Still no hard drive icon when mounting USB hard drives. I do get the removable media icon with USB flash drives. Wonder if it's something to do with Xfce and Thunar. Anymore suggestions?

[kromaz]

I figured out the problem. I setup the partitions for the USB drives using Disk Utility that came with mint install. Looks like it didn't label the filesystem type (ID). 83 is the ID of the native Linux partitions which I was missing. I will always partition my disks in terminal using fdisk. Now I get all my icons on the desktop and in the file manager. I hope this will be helpful for anyone who has had the same issues.

First, I deleted the existing partition and created a new Linux partition using fdisk:

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sudo fdisk /dev/sdb

Assuming /dev/sdb is the external hard disk. Use d to delete the partition and use n to create a new partition. 83 is the ID of the native Linux partition.

Then, I use mkfs.ext4 to format the partition with ext4:

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sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1

Note that mkfs.ext4 expects a partition as its argument.

Finally, I use tune2fs to adjust some parameters:

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sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdb1

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sudo tune2fs -L bakap01 /dev/sdb1

The -m option is for adjusting the percentage of reserved blocks. The reserved blocks are used by privileged processes which is by default 5% of the hard disk size. Since I’m using the external hard disk solely as a storage, I set this to 0 so I can also use those 5% for storage. The -L option is for labeling the filesystem.

[jaderiver]

kromaz:

Kudos to your due diligence and figuring out a solution... I learned something by reading your solution, although some aspects of your terminal commands are still over my head.