Comment 20 for bug 528981

I would strongly advise against trying to force your primary filesystem to remount writeable, especially since it may introduce additional corruption that will make this bug more difficult to troubleshoot. Filesystem bugs like this one are quite difficult to troubleshoot because, for instance, this bug is appearing on a very common hard drive controller and chipset, but it appears on a very small subset of the total number of devices with that chipset.

You can manually mount your USB stick using something like "sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdc1 /mnt" (replacing /dev/sdc1 with the correct location for your particular setup). You can find out where your system sees your USB filesystem by first using "sudo fdisk -l". There's a more comprehensive wiki page available in Ubuntu Community Help: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount/USB .

Also, thanks for the work on the possible duplicates. That list may help the developers, although I note there are problems reported with Ubuntu 9.04, which never caused problems for me.