Comment 1 for bug 85291

I'd like to add a further comment to this bug. I have a computer running Kubuntu Feisty with an external hard drive which is formatted with JFS. At some point it was apparently removed from the computer without being properly unmounted (I'm not sure if this was due to a system crash or someone being careless as I'm not the only user of the computer, and it happened when someone else was using it). The next time the external drive was connected, as usual the KDE automount popup appeared, but when a user attempted to access the disk it failed to mount. I'm afraid I don't remember the exact error message it gave, but it wasn't too helpful. I tried mounting the drive by hand, and that didn't work either. I checked 'dmesg | tail' to see if any information appeared there, and there was a message about JFS. I'm pretty sure that it didn't mention anything about the drive being improperly unmounted, but I guessed that this was the cause of the problem and ran fsck. Sure enough, once fsck had run the drive mounted just fine.

The point I'm trying to make here is that while I've been using Linux for a few years and didn't have too much trouble figuring out what the problem was, the other users of the computer were stumped. The fact that external drives are never fsck'ed is definitely a bad thing from the point of view of data integrity, but if the automounter doesn't detect when an external drive hasn't been properly unmounted and offer the option of checking the system most users are going to be much more confused when the drive won't mount, which I think is a more serious problem.

I realise this isn't strictly an Ubuntu bug but exists upstream too.