USB Flash: No GUI Recognition

[mastablasta]

I would still run a chkdsk on it first. it is possible that part of file system is corrupted. even if you manage to mount it in some "box" it doesn't mean it is mounted properly.
chkdsk can be run using repair disks and similar. maybe even using FreeDOS. you do not nee the whole windows OS to run it.

[Kurt_Alan]

Mounting is no longer the issue. The problem is that when I plug in the drive, there is no GUI interface that enables me to interact with the drive, its files, play music, etc. Desktop settings in xfce are checked so that all removable media should appear--but none of my flash drives on this netbook linux box, my primary computer, appear. Therefore, even though I can mount the drive, I cannot use it. Whereas if I plug the same drive into linux box 2, same distro, the drive's icon appears immediately and I can use it. All of my flash drives on linux box 1--netbook, see specs below--are inaccessible.

I also believe that when I insert a drive after booting, that the OS will not automatically mount it, as it should, and that I have to do a manual mount. Yes, confirmed. My OS will not automatically mount any of my several flash drives. Not sure if you need this:

 lucas@lucas-Inspiron-1011:~$ ls -l /media
total 4
drwxr-x---+ 2 root root 4096 Aug 14 19:22 lucas

and

 lucas@lucas-Inspiron-1011:~$ ls -ld /media
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jun 30 21:02 /media

[Kurt_Alan]

I have already formatted one flash drive to ext4 and the same problems exist, so I don't think chkdsk is relevant.

[sudodus]

Mounting is no longer the issue. The problem is that when I plug in the drive, there is no GUI interface that enables me to interact with the drive, its files, play music, etc. Desktop settings in xfce are checked so that all removable media should appear--but none of my flash drives on this netbook linux box, my primary computer, appear. Therefore, even though I can mount the drive, I cannot use it. Whereas if I plug the same drive into linux box 2, same distro, the drive's icon appears immediately and I can use it. All of my flash drives on linux box 1--netbook, see specs below--are inaccessible.

I also believe that when I insert a drive after booting, that the OS will not automatically mount it, as it should, and that I have to do a manual mount. Yes, confirmed. My OS will not automatically mount any of my several flash drives. Not sure if you need this:

 lucas@lucas-Inspiron-1011:~$ ls -l /media
total 4
drwxr-x---+ 2 root root 4096 Aug 14 19:22 lucas

and

 lucas@lucas-Inspiron-1011:~$ ls -ld /media
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jun 30 21:02 /media

I think the ownership of the mount point for automatic mounting is the problem. Mounting is done without superuser (root) privileges. Try to change the ownership of /media/lucas.

sudo chown lucas:lucas /media/lucas

I'm assuming that your user ID is lucas. If not, create another directory in /media with the same name as your user ID.

After this, it might work with automatic mounting etc. Try un-plugging and re-plugging a pendrive. But remember to unmount (eject) the pendrive before unplugging. Otherwise the file system can be corrupted.

-o-

But after manual mounting you should be able to browse with your file browser (GUI) to /mnt and then access the files in the USB drives.

[Kurt_Alan]

I think the ownership of the mount point for automatic mounting is the problem. Mounting is done without superuser (root) privileges. Try to change the ownership of /media/lucas.

sudo chown lucas:lucas /media/lucas

I'm assuming that your user ID is lucas. If not, create another directory in /media with the same name as your user ID.

After this, it might work with automatic mounting etc. Try un-plugging and re-plugging a pendrive. But remember to unmount (eject) the pendrive before unplugging. Otherwise the file system can be corrupted.

-o-

But after manual mounting you should be able to browse with your file browser (GUI) to /mnt and then access the files in the USB drives.

I can successfully mount and unmount my drives manually. And, yes, to my surprise, I can access and utilize my files via Thunar filemanager navigating /mnt directory (GUI). I got your two points on the umount format and remembering. It's harder to remember to umount manually when you can't see the drive icon!

I could accept the above as a work-around and mark this thread as solved but I would like to try first and solve the automount problem.

You suggested that the problem might be with the ownership of the mount point, noting that mounting is done by non-root owner.

Accordingly I:

 sudo chown lucas:lucas /media/lucas

which outputs:

 drwxr-x---+ 2 lucas lucas 4096 Aug 14 19:22 lucas

so now ownership of /media is non-root. However, when I also:

 ls -ld /media

I am still root:

 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jun 30 21:02 /media

Does option -ld mean copy symbolic links?
This is where I'm stuck. I don't understand why, in the first case root was changed to lucas but in the second case root remained root, /media being the same in both cases.

[sudodus]

Did you try to unmount and unplug the pendrive and then plug it in again? Maybe it works.

If not, maybe it uses some 'synthetic' user ID, and we need to change the permissions too

sudo chmod ugo+rwx /media/lucas

This means full permissions for 'everybody' but if you are the only user, it does not matter. Otherwise we should narrow it down.

I don't think you need to bother about the ownership of /media, as long as there is /media/lucas, and it has good ownership and permissions.

Try once more to unmount and unplug the pendrive and then plug it in again! I think and hope it works now.

[Kurt_Alan]

Did you try to unmount and unplug the pendrive and then plug it in again? Maybe it works.

If not, maybe it uses some 'synthetic' user ID, and we need to change the permissions too

sudo chmod ugo+rwx /media/lucas

This means full permissions for 'everybody' but if you are the only user, it does not matter. Otherwise we should narrow it down.

I don't think you need to bother about the ownership of /media, as long as there is /media/lucas, and it has good ownership and permissions.

Try once more to unmount and unplug the pendrive and then plug it in again! I think and hope it works now.

I applied the chmod input to change ownership to all but this had no effect on automounting.

None of my four or five drives will automount. I plugged multiple drives in different ports, rebooted, etc. All these drives automount on a different linux box.

Meanwhile, I found out that my workaround of manually mounting and navigating to /media files is not sufficient for solving my problem. This is because when I download data from the cloud, my drive, even though it has been manually mounted, does not show in Places. Therefore, I cannot add files directly to drive via downloading.

My /dev/sda1 is one of the earliest solid state drives--only 8 GB. Therefore, I use flashdrives to download subsets of data from the cloud. If I cannot do this, then I can't access my data because there is not enough space on /dev/sda1 to download to /media

I think the smoking gun is the automount fail. Is this a daemon? In what directory is this process described? Is there a way to troubleshoot the automount fail?

[sudodus]

I'm not sure about this, but I think you can start looking at udisks

man udisks

[Kurt_Alan]

I'm not sure about this, but I think you can start looking at udisks

man udisks

I'm marking this thread SOLVED because I solved part of my problem by learning mount and umount. Thanks.