Seeing Hard Drives

I am having a problem with Zorin seeing other drives on my system - be they internal SATA drives and petitions or external usb drives.

Around 50% of the time when I boot up, all drives are visible and mountable. However, the other 50% of the time the drives are not visible whatsoever on the system (e.g. on the desktop, in Computer or in Places), although they do show in GParted.

My first question: How can I get the drives to show if they don't appear on boot-up (other than by rebooting and hoping for the best).

Secondly, when the drives do show in the Places list in the Windows 7 desktop, clicking on them has no effect whatsover. I need to click on them in Computer in order to mount/view them. Does anybody know what clciking on a drive shown in the Places should achieve, and how I can get my suystem to acheive it!?

No - this is a straight (and fresh) install of Zorin. All operations referrred to are being performed through Linux (Zorin). I am not using Windows or VirualBox.

Hi swarfendor437

Thanks for the welcome to the Zorin forum - I do like the OS and it's good to be here!

Yes, I do have other OSs loaded - Wndows 7 on another SATA drive and other Linux OSs on usb drives. I've been thinking about your suggestion but, unfortunately, I don't think this can be the problem in my case. Since loading on Zorin, I have been using that OS almost exclusively, and successive booting to that system has resulted in this 50/50 chance of my other drives appearing (i.e. successive reboots without using other OSs inbetween).

It's all a bit frustrating - since posting this topic I haven't seen the other drives at all!

Hi again swarfendor437

In answer to your questions:

1. GRUB does show Windows on boot up

2. I am fully updated.

3. I have tried disconnecting usb drives prior to boot-up - when subsequenly plugged back in they do power up but that's as far as it goes - they don't show themselves.

Actually, it's now been 3 days since I saw my drives in Zorin, so even my reported 50/50 success rate seems a thing to behold. I'm trying to resist the urge to re-install for the third time, but I don't think it will help much in the longer!

Hi again swarfendor437

Thanks for the post. I can report some success with using Storage Device Manager, but only to a point. I have been able to configure it to manage partitions, but I still have the following issues:

1) Although it seems to be able to see all drives, it cannot see all partitions (it can only see 3/7 on sda, although everything shows in GParted)

2) It cannot dynamically mount other drives, e.g. if you plug in a new usb stick, it still will not automatically mount which is a bit tedious.

Something's strange: they're there, but they just don't want to come out to play! Also, everything shows on older versions of Ubuntu and Mint which I have on usb drives.

I'm not sure if this takes us any further forward technically?

Hi,

have you looked in "dconf-editor":

Stop/Start Media Auto Mounting:
Dconf Editor > Org > Gnome > Desktop > Media-Handling > Automount/Automount-open/Autorun (Put a tick in where you want it!!)

Let us know if that helps.

Regards Wolfman