[gentoo-user] USB Flash Drives automatic mounting breakage (Gnome)

[gentoo-user] USB Flash Drives automatic mounting breakage (Gnome)

[Alan E. Davis]

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Recently, I have had to reboot in order to recover the function of automatic
mounting of USB Flash drives, after some activity, such as mounting and
umounting.   This is happening on two AMD64 systems.

I am often able to unmount manually (# umount /media/KINGSTON , for
example).   All of my flash drives have labels, and usually they mount on
/media, when plugged in.  However, not always, but often, when I have
unmounted one of them, the name stays visible on Nautilus, and it is
impossible to mount it again by plugging it in.

Another time, I reorganized the partitions on a flash drive, into one
partition.  After this, I was unable to plug it in to mount it.

Uniformly, the expected behavior is recovered after rebooting.

I am using these drives to maintain git repositories of subdirectories, so I
need to be able to access various drives on demand, by pluggint them in.  I
am not sure where to look for help.  The USB guide, etc. didnt seem to
help.  Is there an init script that I can restart to recover the volume
management function?

Thank you for any ideas.

Alan Davis
Avid user of Gentoo, knows enough to get into trouble.

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Re: [gentoo-user] USB Flash Drives automatic mounting breakage (Gnome)

[Mick]

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On Monday 04 January 2010 12:55:34 Alan E. Davis wrote:
> Recently, I have had to reboot in order to recover the function of
>  automatic mounting of USB Flash drives, after some activity, such as
>  mounting and umounting.   This is happening on two AMD64 systems.
> 
> I am often able to unmount manually (# umount /media/KINGSTON , for
> example).   All of my flash drives have labels, and usually they mount on
> /media, when plugged in.  However, not always, but often, when I have
> unmounted one of them, the name stays visible on Nautilus, and it is
> impossible to mount it again by plugging it in.
> 
> Another time, I reorganized the partitions on a flash drive, into one
> partition.  After this, I was unable to plug it in to mount it.
> 
> Uniformly, the expected behavior is recovered after rebooting.
> 
> I am using these drives to maintain git repositories of subdirectories, so
>  I need to be able to access various drives on demand, by pluggint them in.
>   I am not sure where to look for help.  The USB guide, etc. didnt seem to
>  help.  Is there an init script that I can restart to recover the volume
>  management function?
> 
> Thank you for any ideas.

All I can say (I don't use Gnome and Nautilus to be more helpful with the 
specifics) is that there is a difference between mounting a device via hal and 
mounting it manually.  I recall that you can't mix the two - when I tried it 
on my machine (using Konqueror) it wouldn't work.  I think hal complained, but 
can't recall off hand.
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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Re: [gentoo-user] USB Flash Drives automatic mounting breakage (Gnome)

[Alan E. Davis]

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Thank you for taking the trouble to answer.

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 6:41 AM, Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> All I can say (I don't use Gnome and Nautilus to be more helpful with the
> specifics) is that there is a difference between mounting a device via hal
> and
> mounting it manually.  I recall that you can't mix the two - when I tried
> it
> on my machine (using Konqueror) it wouldn't work.  I think hal complained,
> but
> can't recall off hand.
>

It seems to me that it is possible to unmount the drives manually, many
times, if not always, if it is impossible to unmount them via nautilus.
Other File Managers work differently, I think Thunar may be more
straightforward, not sure, though.  Maybe this will all pass soon enough,
but for now, on one of my machines, especially, I have to reboot
frequently.  If it's hal that is at work, then perhaps I can restart that?
But when I did something similar, the window manager, at least, restarted.

Thanks again,

Alan

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Re: [gentoo-user] USB Flash Drives automatic mounting breakage (Gnome)

[Mick]

2010/1/5 Alan E. Davis <lngndvs@gmail.com>:

> It seems to me that it is possible to unmount the drives manually, many
> times, if not always, if it is impossible to unmount them via nautilus.
> Other File Managers work differently, I think Thunar may be more
> straightforward, not sure, though.  Maybe this will all pass soon enough,
> but for now, on one of my machines, especially, I have to reboot
> frequently.  If it's hal that is at work, then perhaps I can restart that?
> But when I did something similar, the window manager, at least, restarted.

I'm at my machine now and can report as follows:

Mounting a USB stick manually by running:

$ pmount /dev/sda1

gives me this mounted device:

/dev/sda1 on /media/sda1 type vfat
(rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,quiet,shortname=mixed,uid=1000,gid=441,umask=077,fmask=0177,dmask=0077,iocharset=iso8859-1)

which I *cannot* unmount using Konqueror.  Selecting 'safely remove'
does not do anything (and I can't see any messages in the logs on this
version of Konqueror).

Mounting the device using Konqueror allows me to unmount it both using
the Konqueror GUI and manually by issuing pumount /dev/sda1.

PS.  I have not set up any fancy USB rules for this drive.
-- 
Regards,
Mick