Cannot mount WD Passport USB Drive

[jbor7755]

I'm using both gnome and kde on Hardy x64. I cannot mount my 320GB Western Digital Passport Drive.

Strangely I was able to mount it in the 32bit version of ubuntu.

When I plug it in to gnome I get the message:
"Invalid mount option when attempting to mount the volume 'My Passport'"

The drive is formatted Fat32 and I was able to take all of my music off Ubuntu 32bit before doing a clean install of the x64 version. It mounts in WinXP fine.

Any ideas?

Cheers

[jbor7755]

Also in Kubuntu the message when trying to open this drive is:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1
missing codepage or helper program

[nicedude]

Try using pysdm or learn the mount command.


Here is to install pysdm

sudo apt-get install pysdm

Here is to run it

sudo pysdm

Then select the drive on left part of gui and click mount.

Also I would recommend you look at the mount commands manual page

man mount

as if you learned how mount works you can do it for yourself but if you can't figure out etc then pysdm will 90% chance do it for you.

PS this behavior can happen again if you don't click remove or eject ( I use Windows so little these days I forget which it is ) in Windows or Unmount in Linux although I would say that more than likely you did not eject or remove drive in Windows and this is why it won't mount easily in Linux.

[jbor7755]

I have never not "safely removed" a drive in windows. It turns out that this behaviour is not limited to my Passport drive. I have 3 other flash drives which have all worked fine in Ubuntu 32bit 8.04.1 and which do not mount. All with the same error message:

"Invalid mount option when attempting to mount the volume"

I can mount them manually but these things were supposed to be easily tranferable and portable they should mount automatically. I shouldn't have to install another program just to handle USB drives.

The irony is that I installed Ubuntu x64 from a live USB after having no end of trouble trying to find a reliable CD.

Surely I cannot be the only one with this problem, this is a clean install of Hardy.

[Rocket2DMn]

Can you please post the output of the following commands with the drive plugged in?

sudo fdisk -l
cat /etc/fstab
sudo blkid
mount

[jbor7755]

Can you please post the output of the following commands with the drive plugged in?

sudo fdisk -l
cat /etc/fstab
sudo blkid
mount

result of sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000080

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        5737    46082421    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            5738       38913   266486220    5  Extended
/dev/sda5           38392       38913     4192965   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6           33293       38391    40957686   83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdb: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x5b6ac646

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       38913   312568641    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

fstab

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# /dev/sda6
UUID=4ad3a10f-8e61-458c-bf96-0a41dcc327a2 /               ext3    relatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /dev/sda5
UUID=25205de3-3084-46bb-aa57-aaf3c833e31f none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/sdb1       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom1   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

sudo blkid

/dev/sda1: UUID="82845E70845E6727" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sda5: TYPE="swap" UUID="25205de3-3084-46bb-aa57-aaf3c833e31f" 
/dev/sda6: UUID="4ad3a10f-8e61-458c-bf96-0a41dcc327a2" TYPE="ext3" 
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="My Passport" UUID="E0BF-6A5A" TYPE="vfat"

mount

/dev/sda6 on / type ext3 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
/sys on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
varrun on /var/run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,mode=0755)
varlock on /var/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,mode=1777)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
devshm on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
lrm on /lib/modules/2.6.24-19-generic/volatile type tmpfs (rw)
securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/jacob/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=jacob)

Found another thread on similar (same?) topic. Same sort of info being passed around there also.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=821405&highlight=USB+flash+automount

thanks for offering help.

[Rocket2DMn]

OK, the problem is that you have an fstab entry for /dev/sdb1 which is set to be a cd/dvd drive. Did you have a secondary cd/dvd drive that you removed? We need to disable that entry in fstab, so open it for editing:

gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

and place a # in front of the /dev/sdb1 line

# /dev/sdb1       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

Save and close. Disconnect your camera, wait a moment, then plug it back in. It should automount.

[jbor7755]

<snipped response to deleted post>

Thanks Rocket2DMn for not being an arrogant bore and diagnosing the problem.

Commenting out that line in fstab was successful. When I installed 8.04 I used a live USB made with the Unetbootin software. I figured that would be easier than burning CDs (which I haven't had much luck with). Perhaps this live USB was mounted as a CD (and then all devices of this type were then assumed to be CDs by default)?

Thanks again for your help.

[racecarpete]

Hi I am having some problems along the same lines as what was going on here.

I have a Dell SX280 running Hardy 8.04. The system is equipped with a removable bay DVD rom drive. I've had problems with the DVD drive from the beginning. Apparently, it is pretty common with these drives but that is another issue altogether.

When I insert a thumb drive it will not mount.

I checked everything that Rocket2DMn suggested and sure enough the thumb drive is trying to mount on the same fstab entry for the dvd rom drive at /dev/sdb1.

So I commented this out in fstab and the drive mounted and worked properly.

At this point I'm not sure what i am supposed to be adding to fix this. I need both deviced to work. I'm new to ubuntu but I'm learning quickly.

To me it seems like I should make another entry and manually add the thumb drive to fstab. However, will I be restricted to only this thumb drive?

I took a look at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab and it was very informative but was not much help with my problem as the document said this:

Removable devices such as flash drives *can* be added to fstab, but are typically mounted by gnome-volume-manager and are beyond the scope of this document.

So can anyone assist in what I should be doing?

Thanks,
Peter

[Rocket2DMn]

Let's add your removable cd/dvd drive to fstab using UUID instead of a /dev location. Please plug in the removable bay drive and post the output of

sudo fdisk -l
cat /etc/fstab
sudo blkid
mount