Ubuntu 10.10 wont detct my flash drive

[coffeecat]

@Fremont_Cunningham, I have been using Ubuntu on a variety of machines since about 2006. I have never, EVER had problems automounting FAT32-formatted USB drives. FAT32 is fully supported.

[Fremont_Cunningham]

@Coffeecat - I am very pleased for you
The discussion here is about an ongoing problem where FAT32 USB flash drive does not auto-mount, and suggestions to fix that problem.

[coffeecat]

@Coffeecat - I am very pleased for you
The discussion here is about an ongoing problem where FAT32 USB flash drive does not auto-mount, and suggestions to fix that problem.

I was responding to this:

I suggest that people install usbmount in a desperate attempt to get these new(ish) FAT32 drives to mount. Perhaps the real cure is to get the base UBUNTU istall to deal with FAT32 drives? (They work instantly without any problem in Windows XP.)

There is no cure to be made. The "base install of Ubuntu" does indeed deal with FAT32 filesystems. If you have a FAT32 drive that doesn't automount in Ubuntu but does in Windows, it certainly needs investigating, but you can't assume that Ubuntu is lacking in this respect.

One thing I would look at is the filesystem itself. Windows is fairly tolerant of a corrupted filesystem and will mount it - which is a bad thing, imo. If Ubuntu detects a corrupted FAT32 filesystem it will not mount it in order to protect it from further damage. So it would be a good idea to do a chkdsk in Windows on the drive in question.

[Fremont_Cunningham]

chkdsk in Windows did not seem to show anything odd about the FAT32 8Gig USB Flash stick, result '.. found no problems'. Eventually out of frustration I ran 'format' for this USB Flash stick on the windows machine. (For other readers with this problem SAVE ANY CONTENTS ELSEWHERE FIRST!). After running FAT32 format with default sector size (no other options were possible) windows chkdisk result appeared unchanged. I then moved the Flash stick to the UBUNTU machine, and voila! UBUNTU auto-mounted it! So - it appears that the factory formatting does have some feature (or lacks) that windows does not care about, but UBUNTU does.
I tested a second virgin USB flash stick -same make/model. UBUNTU would not auto-mount it, but System/Administration/DiskUtility did 'see' a 'General USB Flask Disk'. On selecting that the Volume Usage entry showed as '-', whereas the one that had been formatted in windows showed 'Filesystem'.
I then selected the 'Format Volume' option, Type 'FAT'. After it had run the Volume Usage entry showed as 'Filesystem'. After remove and connect of the USB Flash stick UBUNTU auto-mounted it.
I have tested both drives by writing a file on one system and reading on the other system (Windows XP & UBUNTU 10.10 Maverick) and bot seem to work ok.

For those reading this in the future, the 8G USB Flask stick is a CANDY drive by 'Team Group' model SC901. lsusb shows the device as
ID 090c:1000 Feiya Technology Corp. Flash Drive

[coffeecat]

Thanks for posting that information. Useful to know that some pre-formatted USB flash drives are giving problems - if I'm reading you correctly. Factory formats don't usually last long in this household (intentionally! ) which is perhaps why I hadn't seen this.