i was trying xubuntu 14.04 beta and in the icon tab of 'desktop settings', its possible to show 'disks and drives' which lumps together drives the are on internal drives and ones that are attached and it would be nice if i could only select an option to show usb removable drives.
Version: 4.10.0
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AFAIK it's not possible to make a distinction between "external" and "internal" drives in udisks. What you can do is add your internal drives to /etc/fstab so that udisks doesn't handle mounting them, and they won't display in the "devices" list in file managers/xfdesktop.
I suggest wontfix for this bug, but a word from the maintainer would be welcome. Thanks.
Well fixing Bug 10758 might mean that we update the settings dialog to allow the user to pick which mounts are shown on the desktop as the GIO concept of volumes doesn't do what we want... So this may indirectly get implemented.
📎Yousuf Philips @philipzae uploaded an attachment:
(In reply to Julien [nodiscc] from comment 1)
AFAIK it's not possible to make a distinction between "external" and
"internal" drives in udisks. What you can do is add your internal drives to
/etc/fstab so that udisks doesn't handle mounting them, and they won't
display in the "devices" list in file managers/xfdesktop.
Even when having them in fstab, they still appear on the desktop.
It's still very much an issue, at least with internal SATA disks if they're set to non-hotpluggable in your UEFI/BIOS or in the likes of VirtualBox.
(tested with Mint 20.3 Xfce on real hardware and Mint 21.3 Xfce and Xubuntu 23.10 on VirtualBox)
The main issue is that, because Xfce (currently?) lacks a plugin on the panel to list and safely remove any currently-present removable disks in a manner like Cinnamon or even Windows, the second most convenient way I know of is to just right-click a removable disk on the desktop and select "safely remove" (though even this isn't all that much more convenient than opening a Thunar window just to eject a disk if you're working in the likes of LibreOffice with files directly located on multiple USB disks or the like)
Interestingly, Xfce at least nowadays is clearly able to distinguish between internal fixed disks and removable disks in some way because the context menu is different between them; on an internal fixed disk the context menu only lists unmount and not safely remove but, on a removable disk, the context menu lists both unmount and safely remove.
[A GDrive is] generally only created for removable hardware or hardware with removable media.
I guess "generally" is the key word there, and there are cases where they'll be created for non-removable media. There is a g_drive_is_removable() function, so presumably calling that, and then ignoring a drive if it returns true, is the way to go. Not sure if there are other possible consequences there, though.
Interestingly, Xfce at least nowadays is clearly able to distinguish between internal fixed disks and removable disks in some way because the context menu is different between them
Sure, there's e.g. g_volume_can_eject(), so we don't include that option on drives/volumes that don't support it. But that doesn't actually tell you if it's removable or not (as some removable devices can't be ejected, either by design or due to permissions issues).
This may have broken things completely now whereby, in Xubuntu 24.10, not even removable drives appear (e.g. USB or internal SATA disks set to hotpluggable via UEFI/BIOS or the likes of VirtualBox)