Automounting USB stick not working after editing /etc/fstab

After several problems with Linpus I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my AspireOne. It runs quite well now, but there's one small problem: I edited the /etc/fstab file to change the file system of /dev/sda1 to ext2 and to add the option "noatime", as recommended in several guides. This required me to uncomment the line for /dev/sda1 in that file (apparently Ubuntu mounted it automatically before, or it got its mount information from somewhere else?). After I did this, the system could no longer automatically mount a USB stick when I inserted it. I can still mount it manually by adding a line to /etc/fstab for /dev/sdb1, but of course that's not user-friendly enough for my wife . So I tried to use pmount, but pmount complains that /dev/sdb1 is not a removable device. Does anybody know why this is? Did editing the /etc/fstab file for /dev/sda1 make the system think that /dev/sdb is a cdrom drive or something like that?

 

I'm not sure you should have had to uncomment anything in /etc/fstab. Could you copy and paste your current /etc/fstab into a message, maybe someone can see what is wrong with it.

 

You're probably right. Reading this http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-322175.html made me realize that my brain parsed the file /etc/fstab incorrectly (I thought the /dev/sda1 and UUID=.. lines were in fact one line). I will put the comment back before /dev/sda1 and see if that fixes it.

 

Yes, putting the # back before /dev/sda1 solved it. Thanks!