USB Drive – Fix Mounting Issues on Toshiba Satellite

live-usbmounttoshiba-satelliteusb

I have a Lexar 16GB USB stick and for some reason it won't mount. Ubuntu won't even recognize it.

Info about it…nothing much. I used it once as a Backtrack LiveUSB and tried to use it once as an Ubuntu Studio 12.10 LiveUSB (ended up with a Kernel Panic). So now I am trying to just reformat it (easiest/fastest way to wipe everything off) and just use it as a regular USB drive or maybe use it as a Backtrack LiveUSB again.

Is there any way I can force Ubuntu to recognize it? I know the port works as my USB mouse receiver works fine.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (old hardware, I'll upgrade soonish) on a Toshiba Satellite A105.

Edit:

By using this guide I was able to force-mount it, but it still doesn't show up in Places (PCManFM because I use LXDE) like it usually does. Another strange thing, neither does the Windows NTFS partition I set to automount.

It appears that my system has stopped auto-mounting things. The devices show up in their respective /media/deviceHere/ folders, but not under Places in PCManFM

Wierdness.

Oh well. However it was, I just had to delete/unmount anything with the name Lexar or External USB in the media folder and it is now recognized! Thanks anyways @manuel.

Edit:

Never mind, now it has disappeared again. If I want to access the /media/Lexar folder I have to be root and the Windows partition still doesn't show up.

HELP!

Best Answer

Ok, in a chat we haven't found a reason why PCManFM doesn't automount. So here we create an fstab entry for the stick:

We need to create the folder for the stick and get the device id.
Open a terminal. The folder can be created via
```
sudo mkdir /media/mystick
```
In addition I would make the user the owner and give him the right to read/write:
```
sudo chown [user]:[group] /media/mystick
```
```
sudo chmod +rw /media/mystick
```
Now the fstab entry:
- Install libblkid1 to see device specific information: sudo apt-get install libblkid1
- Enter sudo blkid and look for the stick. The output could be:
```
/dev/sda2: UUID="32a4b76f-246e-486e-8495-31b8a781fb4c" TYPE="swap" 
/dev/sde1: LABEL="MAXELL" UUID="8D67-D560" TYPE="vfat" 
```
- Then we create the fstab entry: sudo gedit /etc/fstab and append the line
```
UUID=8D67-D560     /media/mystick   auto    rw,user,auto    0    0
```
  (and afterwards give a empty new line to avoid warnings):

To mount the stick, open a terminal and type

mount /media/mystick

Because of the entry auto it should be mounted automatically if you remove and plug in the stick again.

Related Solutions

Mount USB Drive with Write Permissions for Everyone

Your problem seems to be about the permissions you have set. FAT / FAT32 formatted drives don't support file permissions. The permissions for everything are determined by how the drive is mounted. When you set the permission open it worked when you

server# sudo mount /dev/sdb2 /home/storage -o umask=000

As for it not auto mounting on reboot

UUID=8C52-C1CD /home/storage auto user,umask=000,utf8, -->noauto<-- 0 0

The "noauto" makes this NOT automatically mount when the system starts and parses the /etc/fstab file. Remove that option and it will mount on startup. You can set the permissions on the mount point once it's mounted with chmod or specify them in /etc/fstab.

If you need the media user to access it, you can set the permissions to 764, and add them to the security group. Root always has access to everything.

see http://www.linux.org/threads/file-permissions-chmod.4094/ for some examples of propper file permissions

On a side note, bodhi.zazen made a good point Is there some reason you need to use FAT ? If not, I would back up the data and use a linux native file system. You can then set ownership and permissions.

Ubuntu – Can’t Mount External Drive After Reformatting

Don't worry; your drive is just fine.

When you unmount a drive in Linux (which you had to do in order to format it,) sometimes it won't be re-recognized until you reboot your computer.

Try rebooting, and see if that fixes the problem.

There's nothing that GParted can do anyway that would prevent sudo fdisk -l from noticing the drive. (you did remember sudo, right? ;)

If, for whatever reason, the drive isn't recognized after you reboot, it (likely) wasn't your fault.

After rebooting, if the drive doesn't appear in the launcher, try running GParted again and see if it recognizes the drive. Then check the filesystem on the Ext4 partition (from within GParted.) It'll detect and repair any errors to the filesystem itself. After that, reboot again.

Your partition table is screwed up.

Looking at the output of sudo fdisk -l, I'd have to deduce that your partition table got corrupted. Try opening GParted and going to Device > Create Partition Table, then create a new msdos partition table (the default.) After that finishes, create a new EXT4 partition, but this time tell it to align to Cylinder instead of MiB. (You might lose a tiny bit of space, like .01 GiB tops.)
APPLY the partition creation, then expand the partition to the right, if there's any unused space an that side. (DO NOT move/expand to the left, this will defeat the point of aligning it to Cylinder.)

It seems that the drive shipped with a faulty partition table, which worked with the default formatting (somehow,) but failed when you tried to repartition it.