Ended up setting my laptop back on a dual-boot setup yesterday. Today I decided I didn’t want to have to mount my DATA partition (which has my pics and music on it) by hand every time I booted up. I found a great guide to several ways to do this here. I chose the method using pysdm because I didn’t feel like editing any system files.

open up terminal and install pysdm:

sudo apt-get install pysdm

then open the program in the same terminal:

sudo pysdm

You have to know the correct partition to mount and you can click on each partition and configure any that need to be configured to see what they are formatted as. Once you know which one to mount  click the mount button as that partition is highlighted on the left. Then click on the button which reads “Assistant” and make sure it is set to mount at boot (that’s the default setting, so it should be good to go).

Then click “Apply.” You should be good to go!

Due to a rather zany situation I had to grab an external drive. I was at Besr Buy and the best bang for my buck was the SimpleDrive. I backed up my data on my wife’s Vista notebook and was done. But when I plugged it into my Ubuntu desktop and got a really weird message about not being able to mount the drive. It is the same as the one in this post. Basically (as was advised in the post) I had to reboot in a windows machine and deactivate the drive for safe removal. Supposedly this would fix the problem.

So I did so and rebooted in Ubuntu – but now the drive wasn’t detected at all. I rebooted in Windows. Same issue. What I did to fix the problem was to unplug the power of the drive and then plug it back in – basically restarting it. I guess after being “unmounted” in windows, the drive had to be restarted to be active again.

But now it works fine, just like it’s supposed to.

oh, and note that I did this on a desktop running Ubuntu 7.10. I assume it’ll work the same for Gutsy and Intrepid.