unlabeled partitions are mounted under their UUIDs

Actually, I used to have this problem in Karmic, but I cannot reproduce it any more.

Your dk-disks dump shows that your device does not actually have a label (or that dk-disks fails to detect it). When you plugged in such a device in question, can you please also attach /var/log/kern.log, and give me the output of

  sudo blkid /dev/sd*

?

The problem was the drive didn't have a label. I had to install gparted and
umount the drive. Gparted allowed me to label the drive. When I brought it
back up it was mounted under the label.

Thanks!

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 2:33 AM, Martin Pitt <email address hidden> wrote:

> Actually, I used to have this problem in Karmic, but I cannot reproduce
> it any more.
>
> Your dk-disks dump shows that your device does not actually have a label
> (or that dk-disks fails to detect it). When you plugged in such a device
> in question, can you please also attach /var/log/kern.log, and give me
> the output of
>
> sudo blkid /dev/sd*
>
> ?
>
> ** Package changed: devicekit (Ubuntu) => gvfs (Ubuntu)
>
> ** Changed in: gvfs (Ubuntu)
> Status: New => Confirmed
>
> ** Package changed: gvfs (Ubuntu) => devicekit-disks (Ubuntu)
>
> ** Changed in: devicekit-disks (Ubuntu)
> Status: Confirmed => Incomplete
>
> --
> external usb disk drives are mounted under their UUID's
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/390304
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>
> Status in “devicekit-disks” source package in Ubuntu: Incomplete
>
> Bug description:
> All my external hard-drives are mounted under the UUID for the drive as the
> name.
>
> System:
> Ubuntu 9.10 - Latest updates
>

--
I tend to pee on things

I can confirm this and reproduce it on many machines running Karmic. If a partition is unlabeled, mounting it will mount it to /media/$UUID instead of /media/disk-#

So will this be fixed in karmic or is it intended behavior?

I don't believe this to be the intended behavior. It may be a side-effect of moving to devicekit, but the intended behavior in Ubuntu has always been human readable names for mount points such as /media/disk, disk-1, disk-2... and so on.

Chris, please comment as you triage. Is there a reason you marked this bug as being of "Low" importance?

I think of this kind of bug as urgent, it should be corrected before karmic is released.

The changes that were made in karmic which make this bug possible:
-applications now use udev directly (using libudev)
-devicekit-disks replaces what used to be handled by the disk handling part of HAL

Spoke to Chris Coulson via IRC and he makes a strong point about persistence in mount point paths. With UUIDs as mount points, the mount points will be unique and will remain the same no matter what order the drives are loaded.

However the counterpoint is just as persuasive, it just depends which point of view you look at it from. New users to ubuntu, users typing in a path manually, users using application that do not utilize GIO and users that do not have auto-complete will find the change to UUID-based mount points to be extremely complicated as compared to the old mountpoints (/media/disk).

This behavior also changes what users have gotten used to. I fear this will alienate users, and show too much complication in a path when it is not necessary.

The argument on both sides sound very similar at this point:
New users say "If you want persistence in mount point names you can always label the disk."
Advanced users say "If you want simplicity in mount point names you can always label the disk."

That being said, the process to relabel a disk is not easy enough that we can do it in nautilus (like you could in mac's finder or windows' explorer). This would be much easier if we could graphically/easily re-label a disk without using command-line tools.

This is how it's done currently: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RenameUSBDrive

This is a brainstorm requesting simpler renaming by use of the desktop environment (no apps or command line)
See Brainstorm:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/20148/
And solution #3:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/20859/

I, for example, have a lot of scripts to backup different parts of my HD (it's more complicated than just backing up the whole $HOME folder) and I have to specify the USB path in those scripts. Now say I switch to a different USB flash drive, then I have to change all those scripts. Then there is the point komputes makes about new users without completion or completion experience.

Of course Ubuntu should distinguish the different drives (disk, disk-1, disk-2, ...). But can you give me any practical example in which it helps to have these complicated yet persistant path names?

komputes [2009-08-21 1:37 -0000]:
> That being said, the process to relabel a disk is not easy enough that
> we can do it in nautilus (like you could in mac's finder or windows'
> explorer).

I agree that it should be possible in nautilus.

> This would be much easier if we could graphically/easily re- label a
> disk without using command-line tools.

That's possible now, check Apps -> System Tools -> Manage Drives
and Media. You can easily label drives there.

Do you mean palimpsest? I am not able to change the label for my USB drive there.

Btw, Martin: since the bug is karmic-specific, it's not so out of line to put "karmic" into the title. It's your call though. :)

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RenameUSBDrive
command line and gui

--
You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic
condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some
time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the
defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all
life. Everywhere in the universe. Philip K. Dick

I have a reiserfs partition that I cannot label by any means, neither palimpsest, nor gparted, being sudo or not. Fat partitions can be re-labeled though.

Ah, just saw that you need "reiserfstune" for that. It's a bit tricky for a beginner though.

Bernhard - we prefer not to have release names in bug titles. If this bug is still open when Karmic is released, then Karmic+1 will automatically have the same issue. This means it is not karmic-specific then, and makes it incredibly confusing and much more work to hand edit all the bugs with release names in the title. Please don't do it :)

Comment 13 & 14 from Bernhard exposes the thought process that most users go though when trying to relabel. Using gparted or palimpsest to re-label an unmounted disk may not work, since the user may be missing packages like ntfsprogs jfsutils reiserfsprogs xfsprogs, since they are not shipped with the distribution.

Nautilus currently does not support renaming partitions, I am proposing that this changes. If palimpsest or gparted can re-label an unmounted disk, why not have nautilus do the same thing (i.e. call on the same command line programs that palimpsest and gparted use) to re-label disks.

An extra concern I have noticed is that you must *unmount* a disk before renaming in. In my experience you can rename a disk as is, in a mounted/unmounted state (like you could in mac's finder or windows' explorer). If this is a technical limitation, I think the label change can be held on to until the user unmounts the disk or shuts down the system.

If anyone can explain why Mac/Win users can rename a disk while mounted but we have to unmount to rename, please let me know.

For those of you who say that the underlying naming scheme is hidden, I would like to expose that it is not well hidden.

Primarily, when opening a disk, the UUID will be the title of the window.
Secondarily, when clicking on the location bar (pencil icon) it exposes the UUID.
Tertiary, when running programs as root, locations will have UUID names (not simple abstracted names based on size).

I have added some screenshots to demonstrate this:

1 &2 ) Opening the disk exposes UUID in title bar. Clicking the location bar also exposes UUID, see:
fat1-uuid-title.png
fat2-uuid-title.png
extfs-uuid-title.png

3) Running programs as root, exposes UUID as location names. See the following two comparisons,
file-roller-as-root-user_comp.png
nautilus-as-root-user_comp.png

@pitti Martin Pitt - I am glad that "[You] agree that it should be possible in nautilus."

I hope you did not confuse this bug as a feature request to make disk labeling part of nautilus. That is not the purpose of this bug (please review the Wishlist importance if that is what it is based on). I was simply saying that not being able to rename in nautilus adds to the problem. I agree that renaming disks in nautilus is a wishlist request.

Mounting to /media/$UUID, on the other hand, is an important bug and should be reviewed with upsteam.

We need to discuss if we could/should revert to the expected behavior of mounting to /media/disk-#

Who is upsteam in this case: debian or freedesktop?

In fact the wishlist to have nautilus provide support for changing volume labels has already been Wishlisted here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/68924

I didn't actually confuse it with the nautilus renaming wishlist bug, I just set it to wishlist because it's not a bug in the sense of "unintended behaviour". The current behaviour is intended.

However, I tend to agree that it's not really desirable in the GUI sense.

> Who is upsteam in this case: debian or freedesktop?

freedesktop, we should forward the bug there and discuss it with David. I'll do that in a bit, but after the feature freeze rush.

Before devicekit-disks (so up to and including Jaunty) it was possible to change the mount location by right-clicking on the drive icon. I think this was functionality of gnome-mount which is now gone.

This functionality is related to this bug. Is it still possible to change the location devicekit-disks will mount a specific disk on? The UI of the gnome-mount functionality is no longer there.

Martijn Vermaat [2009-09-16 12:54 -0000]:
> This functionality is related to this bug. Is it still possible to
> change the location devicekit-disks will mount a specific disk on? The
> UI of the gnome-mount functionality is no longer there.

You can change the label in System -> Admin -> Drive Management.

My previous comment seems to be addressed in bug #423058

Now add a label to the drive and remount it and the label is used in /media/your-disk-label.

To label in Karmic 9.10 release, go to "System -> Administration -> Disk Utility" in Karmic release
Select the drive and then partition, there will be a label field text box you can use their.

Unmount and remount the drive via nautilus to see the label used as the mount name in /media

I think the behaviour of using uuid is correct when a disk does not have a label.
Just supply a label for your disk and use that in your scripts.
This is user manageable. I think this is the way to go.

System -> Administration -> Disk Utility (Palimpsest) -> change label

No need to unmount first, just remount (unmount and mount) after changing the label in order
to see the mountpoint at your newly given label /media/label.
This works great and i hope that canonical will keep this in future releases.
The disk, disk-1 solution wasn't working either and confuses a lot more.

I cant seem to label it on my android phone. However, either way, it should
be consistent with what nautilus is calling it. 169gb drive makes more sense
for an unlabled drive than the uuid.

Sent From My Awesome Mobile

On 15 Nov 2009 10:50, "Martijn Kaandorp" <email address hidden> wrote:

System -> Administration -> Disk Utility (Palimpsest) -> change label

No need to unmount first, just remount (unmount and mount) after changing
the label in order
to see the mountpoint at your newly given label /media/label.
This works great and i hope that canonical will keep this in future
releases.
The disk, disk-1 solution wasn't working either and confuses a lot more.

-- unlabeled partitions are mounted under their UUIDs
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/390304 You r...

This was a pretty short-sighted decision. I have a bunch of scripts that depend on the drive being mounted as /media/disk. If I try the work-around and label it as "disk", it gets mounted on "/media/DISK" since fat32 isn't honoring the lower-case disk label. Soooo I'm left with a bunch of broken scripts....

There really should be a way to disable this behavior. I realize if you live your life in the GUI, you probably don't care that your drive is mounted as /media/[R2D2 vomit], but if you spend a fair amount of time on the command-line, this will drive you absolutely insane quite fast.