I found it remarkably irritating that Fedora 8
mounts all the partitions which I deliberately
left out of the FSTAB because I didn't want to
access them.
After some help from the hal mailing list, I found
how to make it stop:
Create a .fdi file (the name at least some distros
use is no-fixed-drives.fdi) in the /etc/hal/fdi/policy/
directory, and stick this xml in it:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="@block.storage_device:storage.hotpluggable" bool="false">
<match key="@block.storage_device:storage.removable" bool="false">
<merge key="volume.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
</match>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>
This will tell hal not to blab about fixed disks and so gnome will
never get told to mount them. By the same token, I fixed my problem
with the USB backup disk I don't want anyone to mount by creating
the stop-hal-stop.fdi file that looks very similar:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="volume.label" string="BACKUP">
<merge key="volume.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>
In this case I specifically look for the label I put on the
partition.
