Disable auto-mount for particular partitions on USB drives

I have a big USB disk with 3 partitions: one for backup and two other bootable ones for installing and testing new distros. I want the backup partition automounted on boot. But I don't want the two test partitions automounted. Despite my use of "noauto" in /etc/fstab, something (gnome?) seems to be mounting them when I plug the drive it.

LABEL=mybook            /srv/backup     ext4    defaults        0       2
LABEL=mybook-root       /media/mybook-root ext4    user,noauto  0       2
LABEL=mybook-spare      /media/mybook-spare ext4   user,noauto  0       2

In previous Ubuntu distributions it seems that it was possible to configure gnome so it would avoid mounting particular partitions on removable drives like USB:

gnome-mount --write-settings --mount-options noauto --device /dev/sda1

This is no longer available in Lucid (when did it go away?)

Is there another way to do this now?

Solution 1:

for this purpose I'm using the following line in /etc/fstab and i've not done any modification in gnome... it works in ubuntu 11.04

# Prevent mounting specific partition on external hd
UUID=57f8f4bc-abf4-0000-675f-946fc0f9f25b none ext4 ro,noauto

there are two differences between my fstab and yours:

1. I use partition UUID instead of LABEL
2. I set 'none' as mount point

I don't know which is the difference that makes my config working, but I'd bet the second one..

(if you want to get the UUID of the partition you can use the command sudo blkid)

Solution 2:

gnome-mount was replaced at some point by gvfs-mount, and the use case described in the original question seems to no longer be supported in gnome.

So here is a workaround, following on the experience described by @clemmy. It involves simply listing a nonexistent directory as the mount point for partitions you don't wan't to be automatically mounted. E.g. in this case, it would work to simply delete the relevant directories listed in the fstab, e.g. "/media/mybook-spare". Unfortunately, when the user does want to mount that partition, it of course requires that the user re-create the directory (or edit the fstab).