vfat mount broken on external USB devices

[Sergey V. Udaltsov]

External USB devices using vfat system (checked with iPod shuffle and Nikon
Coolpix 885) cannot be mounted using gnome. Once I insert them, the icon appears
on the top of the desktop (in GNOME panel, gnome-mount applet or smth). When I
click on the icons and ask to mount - I get big error message:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so.

I suspect the right device would be /dev/sdc1 - but how could I explain this to
the system?...

[Sergey V. Udaltsov (svu)]

Additional info - in hal-device-manager, there is a big difference between FC4
and ubuntu. Ubuntu shows the device only - let's say, /dev/sdc. And no volumes.
Though
FC4 shows vfat volume below the hardware device node. That is why trying to
mount anything in, say, /dev/sdc, it successfully mounts /dev/sdc1. So the
problem is that for some reason hal in ubuntu does not see volumes.

[Sergey V. Udaltsov (svu)]

It works if you run hald with --retail-privileges!! And this option is used in
FC4 as well!

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Sounds like bug #26338. What does

  id hal

say?

[Sergey V. Udaltsov (svu)]

$ id hal
uid=111(hal) gid=111(hal) groups=111(hal)

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> $ id hal
> uid=111(hal) gid=111(hal) groups=111(hal)

As I suspected, thanks for checking. Please do

  sudo adduser hal floppy
  sudo adduser hal plugdev
  sudo adduser hal cdrom

to fix it properly for you. I'll investigate the root cause in the merged bug.

This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 26338.