Comment 26 for bug 102097

I also have this problem on Kubuntu Gutsy installed clean. I posted details at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=594421. I'll repeat some of that here for convenience and add a few things.

Short description is that no USB removable FAT file system will automount in my Kubuntu Gutsy. I have a USB external FAT hard drive, several flash sticks, and a USB card reader. The USB external hard drive connects directly to the motherboard port, the sticks and card reader through a hub. My USB printer, Bluetooth stick, and camera have no problems with auto mounting, and the Bluetooth connects through the USB hub. It is only USB removable storage devices with FAT file systems that don't auto mount.

I have tried adding the USB HD to /etc/fstab at its usually assigned address, but Kubuntu also tries to create a drive out of the 1K marker for the extended partition on another ext3 internal hard drive. It seems that whatever is next in line, be it the USB HD's entry (usually sdd or sdi) or the floppy drive (fd0), that bogus partition captures other devices' entries. The other mounts on that other disk are hda1, hda5 (only entry in the extended partition), and hda3 (linux swap partition). I can manually create the mounting for the USB drive only if the 1K extended partition marker doesn't steal the mounting point. At the moment it is squatting on the floppy's mounting point, but the floppy works fine. I finally solved this by putting the USB HD in fstab by name rather than address. No problems with the internal NTFS volume loading.

My initial workaround for the flash sticks and cards uses Dolphin''s Storage Media, which notes the insertion of the sticks/cards/USB HD even though they are not mounted. Opening the stick/card/HD in Dolphin correctly automatically mounts the devices. This gets pretty annoying of one is swapping sticks or cards a lot. I can also see all the inserted devices using "lsusb" when they are not auto mounted. The problem is not one of detecting the devices--all are detected immediately upon insertion, just not auto mounted.

Then I discovered that if I used Dolphin to mount the sticks and cards that I commonly use, but giving them custom mounting point names and checking the auto mount box in the mounting dialog allows the devices to be automounted after that, even after restarts. The mounting points in /media are recreated upon insertion. Devices that didn't go through this process still do not automount, though.

Running 'dmesg | grep usb' produces the following new lines after plugging in a USB stick:

[117008.216420] usb-storage: device found at 14
[117008.216422] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[117013.205095] usb-storage: device scan complete

Running 'udevmonitor --udev' while plugging in a USB flash stick gives:

UDEV [1194051580.440807] add /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0b.1/usb1/1-2/1-2.4/1-2.4.1 (usb)
UDEV [1194051580.443599] add /class/usb_endpoint/usbdev1.16_ep00 (usb_endpoint)
UDEV [1194051580.460611] add /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0b.1/usb1/1-2/1-2.4/1-2.4.1/1-2.4.1:1.0 (usb)
UDEV [1194051580.466864] add /class/scsi_host/host10 (scsi_host)
UDEV [1194051580.467364] add /class/usb_endpoint/usbdev1.16_ep81 (usb_endpoint)
UDEV [1194051580.467819] add /class/usb_endpoint/usbdev1.16_ep02 (usb_endpoint)
UDEV [1194051580.476322] add /class/usb_device/usbdev1.16 (usb_device)
UDEV [1194051585.564444] add /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0b.1/usb1/1-2/1-2.4/1-2.4.1/1-2.4.1:1.0/host10/target10:0:0/10:0:0:0 (scsi)
UDEV [1194051585.564460] add /class/scsi_disk/10:0:0:0 (scsi_disk)
UDEV [1194051585.564465] add /class/scsi_device/10:0:0:0 (scsi_device)
UDEV [1194051585.565041] add /class/scsi_generic/sg9 (scsi_generic)
UDEV [1194051585.668310] add /block/sdj (block)
UDEV [1194051585.706824] add /block/sdj/sdj1 (block)

I understand that the USB portion of the Gutsy kernel was extensively rewritten for laptop autosuspend functionality. I wonder if this isn't fallout from that rewrite. Reinstalling mount, pmount, and hal did not help, and neither did loading Feisty's hal. Judging from posts on the boards, this problem is pretty wide-spread.