Ubuntu 12.04 stopped suddenly to recognize all usb storage.

Question

Storage gets listed in lsub but is not mounted by nautilus. I tried 2 different devices: a usb stick and an external HDD. usb mouse on same port works fine. is there anyway to force mount it?

my /etc/fstab file,

# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> 
proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 
# / was on /dev/sda6 during installation 
UUID=f1fd50a1-7a61-413c-9332-4bf94cb3321c / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 
# swap was on /dev/sda7 during installation 
UUID=4d1ab5a9-4477-4222-b6d0-cdc5818fc55e none swap sw 0 0

Solution

I'm not sure why Nautilus isn't showing the drives. It looks like they're showing up as sdb, so you can attempt to force mount the partitions by using sdb1, sdb2, etc. Assuming you're mounting the first partition, first make a folder somewhere (I'll use /mnt/sdb1 for this example), then run:

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1

Then cd into /mnt/sdb1 and see if the files are showing up. Any error you get will help you diagnose the real problem. I would normally guess here that the filesystem might be corrupt, but that's unlikely to be true for two separate drives.

Comments

[hingev]

what dmsg shows?

[Rahul Virpara]

cat /etc/fstab what it shows?

[eli]

what do you mean "dmsg"?

[eli]

cat/etc/fstab shows: # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 # / was on /dev/sda6 during installation UUID=f1fd50a1-7a61-413c-9332-4bf94cb3321c / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # swap was on /dev/sda7 during installation UUID=4d1ab5a9-4477-4222-b6d0-cdc5818fc55e none swap sw 0 0

[eli]

here it is: pastebin.com/sVxEt5pf.

[Blank]

Also, Nautilus usually tries to mount the drives somewhere in /media; you might check there and see if maybe it's just not showing up in the file manager. It'll be either /media/[Drive Label] or /media/[UUID] by default, I think.

[eli]

It worked and mounted the drive with this error message: eli@eli-Latitude-E6420:~$ sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0). The file system wasn't safely closed on Windows. Fixing.

[eli]

after un-mounting and re-inserting the drive to the usb port- nautilus still does not mount it automatically. it does not apear in /media either. I mounted it again using the mount command and this time got no error message.

[nanofarad]

@eli Try opening terminal and running sudo fsck /dev/sdb1or sudo dosfsck /dev/sdb1. You can't paste the command into Terminal without right-clicking, so type them. Carefully. Also, *be sure to change the device name as necessary as fsck can, in rare cases , do weird things where you don't want them to be done.

[eli]

I get this message: fsck: fsck.ntfs: not found. and for the second command: Currently, only 1 or 2 FATs are supported, not 0.