Comment 9 for bug 49890

I have what I think may be the same problem, though in my case it is not 100% reproducible.

Steps to reproduce my situation:

1. Format an external USB drive, with a partition (ext3 in my case) and a volume label "foo" for that partition.

2. Turn off the computer, connect the USB drive, power it on, and boot the PC (into Ubuntu 7.10 in my case).

3. See whether hal has picked up the existence of the external usb disk by doing:

                      hal-find-by-property --key volume.label --string "foo"

Actual results: Sometimes (not always) a blank.
Expected results: something like

              /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_5e69384_........

Other remarks: In all other respects, hal is working normally. Also, the label "foo" does appear correctly in /dev/disk/by-label/ and the disk is mountable, using the mount command. Finally, if hal is restarted later, using "sudo invoke-rc.d hal restart", then the USB disk is correctly detected by hal.

I wonder if this happens due to a timing issue: in gutsy, hal is started earlier in the boot process than it was in feisty. Perhaps the USB disk is not detected because something is not ready when the hal daemon starts.