Description of problem: gparted can leave the following file around: /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/gparted-disable-automount.fdi This sets ignore=true for all disk drives, which causes nothing afterwards to be auto-mounted. Haven't established whether this is normal or under error conditions (my drive is formatted now with data on!) This has just taken me 2 days to find out why suddenly automount had stopped working! I had just formatted a new external drive using gparted, but couldn't put the link to gparted. I assume this is needed for good reasons, so quite how you fix it, I don't know, but it's REALLY confusing and irritating when it happens! Maybe it's actually a system boot intialisation issue.. Additional info: I got the answer from: http://www.nabble.com/gnome-volume-manager-not-mounting-USB-drives-t3206706.html
More details - the contents of the file are: <deviceinfo version='0.2'> <device> <match key='@block.storage_device:storage.hotpluggable' bool='true'> <merge key='volume.ignore' type='bool'>true</merge> </match> </device> </deviceinfo> Plus comment (afterthought) Also, actually, the 'clean' way here, should gparted go out leaving this file hanging, is actually that hal grants a temporary blocking of hotpluggable, which hal then resets at next system boot. Or you have to crate a boot script to clean out the file. So actually the best fix might be in hal or the system boot routines...
This most likely happened to you because gparted didn't exit cleanly after its last use (something like you rebooting the system while gparted is still running). Anyway, the issue is fixed with F7 and above; unfortunately this no fix for it for FC-6 other than manually removing the file '/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/gparted-disable-automount.fdi'. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 215657 ***