Why does my laptop mount external drives?

[anasttin]

Hi gang,

If I plug an external hard drive into a USB port on any computer I've ever worked with, the drive simply becomes accessible, which is great.

The thing is that I have a laptop provided by my school that seems to need to mount drives which is a nuisance because I have to unmount it when swapping to another computer and it often doesn't update when I re attach it, meaning it doesn't show the latest contents of the drive.

When I plug it in, it to the offending laptop, it say "drive mounted as drive 'K'" and then it is accessible.

Can anyone tell me how I make it like every other computer and just allow access without mounting/unmounting?

Thanks for your help.

Ana

 

[TheStroyer]

Hi Ana

It's normal that computers need to mount hard drives, but it often happens behind the scenes. Normally computers also automatically unmount the drive upon unplugging or shutting down.
If you write to a drive and immediately unplug it it can cause problems, because your computer might be halfway trough writing a file. If you have just written to the drive and want to plug it out you should then click unmount (or something similarly named) when unplugging the drive.
About it not showing the latest contents of the drive, that's weird, and I would need more information on that to help you with that.

Cheers,
Friso

 

[anasttin]

Hi Friso,

Yes it is weird.

The usual pattern is as follows...

My laptop is in sleep mode. I unplug the external drive out of the offending laptop and put it on another computer. Copy movie files onto the external drive from that other computer. Unplug it and re plug it into the offending laptop. Wake the laptop from sleep mode and look for the new movie files I just copied and can't find them. I have to unmount (ie. safely remove the drive), unplug it and then replug it (which mounts the drive) and then I can see the files.

I thought it was just a problem of the screen not being refreshed, but I've exited windows explorer and gone back in, but still see only the original files on the drive.

Very weird.

This doesn't happen on any of my other computers.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks guys.

Ana