Mount USB drive on Ubuntu: "Not Authorized"

ubuntu usb-flash-drive mount ubuntu-11.10

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The dmesg information is reasonable; the media value for FAT32 should be 0x0b.

You might want to try /dev/sdb1. USB mass storage is used for both harddisks and flash. Since harddisks traditionally had partitions, and flash didn't, there's no sure way to predict if a given USB device will have a partition table.

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Paul Lammertsma

Senior Developer Relations Engineer for Android, Wear OS and Android TV. Co-founder and former CTO of Pixplicity. I occasionally speak at Android conferences and am an advocate of open software. I did both my bachelor and master at Utrecht University's Institute of Information and Computing Sciences.

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Paul Lammertsma almost 2 years
I'm having some problems with my Ubuntu 11.10 installation on a Toshiba A300-16l laptop, of which the primary problem appears to be allowing permissions escalation.

I want to backup my home directory before reinstalling Ubuntu, but I can't seem to get my USB stick mounted. Each time I plug it in, I get the following error:

Unable to mount USB DISK
Not Authorized

The device shows up with lsusb as "Kingston Techonlogy Company Inc.", and dmesg | tail gives:
```
 sdb: sdb1
sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
```
Attempting to mount it manually gives:
```
$ sudo mkdir /mnt/sdb
$ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /mnt/sdb
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so
```
Finally, dmesg | tail gives:
```
FAT-fs (sdb): invalid media value (0xb9)
FAT-fs (sdb): Can't find a valid FAT filesystem
```
Is there any hope of getting this working?
- MSalters over 12 years
  
  Is there any other machine that does recognize the USB stick, and if so, what filesystem is used on the stick?
FatalError over 12 years

Just to add, you can use file -s to get some info about the device: sudo file -s /dev/sdb and same for sdb1 if you have it.
Paul Lammertsma over 12 years

Instantly worked. I should have tried the other sdb* devices, but for some reason was confused by the error with sdb.
Paul Lammertsma over 12 years

@FatalError: Sure enough, Ubuntu lists it with "partition 1". It then makes sense that /dev/ contains precisely /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb1. Thanks for the tip!