Comment 26 for bug 211760

This is quite the bug, actually. I have two USB drives. My original, which I presumed was bad (since it wouldn't load in 8.04), still refuses to auto mount. It gets detected by the kernel, and recognized by hal, to some degree, but fails to actually mount anywhere. My other USB drive works flawlessly. Plug it in and it mounts.

I used the mtools package to attempt to determine the differences between the two. What I found was the the original device is missing a disk type attribute (well, it's blank). The working one shows FAT16.

Out of curiosity I tried to mount both manually (I disabled hal),

root@justice:~# /etc/init.d/hal stop
 * Stopping Hardware abstraction layer hald [ OK ]
root@justice:~# mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

I swapped in the "working" drive.

root@justice:~# mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt
root@justice:~# ls /mnt/
... files ...

For some reason mount isn't detecting the filesystem correctly.

I decided to try dosfsck to see if I could perhaps fix the problem with my disk type attribute.

root@justice:~# dosfsck /dev/sdd1
dosfsck 2.11, 12 Mar 2005, FAT32, LFN
Seek to 4127161856:Invalid argument

And on the new one I get...

root@justice:~# dosfsck /dev/sdd1
dosfsck 2.11, 12 Mar 2005, FAT32, LFN
... copious output ...

I'm not sure exactly what all this means, but I suspect that the problem with most of these USB drives is that they were used with a previous version of ubuntu that corrupted them in some way so that the newest version is unable to automatically read and mount them.

Can anyone else confirm my findings?