10.04 NOT seeing USB drive, 10.10 does

[dkolars]

Was travelling this past week... HP laptop running Ubuntu 10.10 running out of storage... so, got a Seagate 500 Gb USB drive. Plugged it in, deleted the files on it, and used it to store many videos...

Come home, plug new HDD into my Dell desktop, Ubuntu 10.04... it does NOT see the drive, let alone mount it...

Have searched forums, newsgroups, etc. for the past 45 mins. nothing that I found works...

Any clues as to why this could be happening? I'm using fstab to mount 2 internal and 5 external drives at boot up, but don't know why I shouldn't be able to plug in another drive and have it recognized... I can plug in memory sticks no problem...

I'm going to upgrade desktop to 10.10 tonight, as 10.04 has been nothing but problems since I upgraded from 9.10... I've wasted countless hours dealing with 10.04... dunno what others think, but I'd rather be back at Win 3.1 instead of 10.04... it is horrible!!

[lmarmisa]

Sometimes the problems like yours are due to directories existing in the folder /media. If a mount attempt was aborted by some reason, then those directories could remain there and they impede new mounts.

So, unplug your USB drive, open a terminal, type these two commands and post the results:



cat /etc/fstab
ls -l /media


Best regards,

Luis

[dkolars]

Thanks... already checked that.... /media has all the directories that it's supposed to have, nothing extra... fstab is correct... I spent a few hours getting fstab set up to properly mount all my drives at boot up, so recognize the contents!!

What I'm not understanding is why I can plug in ANY USB memory stick and it will be recognized... but, plug in USB HDD, and it's not seen... Should it not be recognized as a storage device, as a memory stick is? It has no OS on it, only video (.avi & .mts) and graphic (.jpg) files on it... as I say, 10.10 saw it instantly... I'm upgrading to 10.10 right now on the desktop so hopefully that will get rid of the problems...

[lmarmisa]

Try to use the command lsusb.

[lmarmisa]

Thanks... already checked that.... /media has all the directories that it's supposed to have, nothing extra... fstab is correct... I spent a few hours getting fstab set up to properly mount all my drives at boot up, so recognize the contents!!

What I'm not understanding is why I can plug in ANY USB memory stick and it will be recognized... but, plug in USB HDD, and it's not seen... Should it not be recognized as a storage device, as a memory stick is? It has no OS on it, only video (.avi & .mts) and graphic (.jpg) files on it... as I say, 10.10 saw it instantly... I'm upgrading to 10.10 right now on the desktop so hopefully that will get rid of the problems...

Do you see your external drive in the different options below Places?.

[dkolars]

No, not seeing drive in the place your screen shot shows... HOWEVER, I just upgraded to 10.10... now, when I plug in the drive, with Nautilus open, the drive shows in the left hand pane, then disappears, then shows, then disappears, etc... IF I am able to click on it, I can see the contents in the main window, then the icons of all the drives, then the contents, icons, etc. about 3-4 times, then the drive disappears... I get the following error message:


Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.

See that Windows is mentioned... I think I'll pull all the files off the drive onto SD cards, then to my desktop, over and over again (!), then format it with the laptop, as it sees it just fine... grrrrr...

[dkolars]

Plugged in my iPhone to charge before heading to bed... connect, disconnect, connect, disconnect, etc... NEVER had that before...

This a.m. plug in the iPhone, says it can't mount it, but it is mounted. Plug in the new USB drive, says it can't mount it, but it is mounted. I'm moving files now... Is there a "period of adjustment", like in a marriage, when Ubuntu gets upgraded? :D

Haven't done a re-boot yet to see the results, but for some reason all seems to be working now???

[dkolars]

All fixed... I think? I re-booted and it was gone... thought it might be...
So, formatted it to ext3, labelled it, created that sub-dir in /media, and now when I plug it in, it's treated like removable media instead of a HDD. Seems to work just fine...

Of course, after the upgrade to 10.10, I now have all kinds of other problems with Firefox, K-mail, etc. Sheesh...