Nautilus has trouble opening external volumes with power-saving feature

[Ryan Prior]

Binary package hint: nautilus

Steps to reproduce the problem:
> Plug in a Seagate Free Agent external hard drive (or presumably others as well)
> Do not use the drive for five minutes or so, until it goes into power-saving mode
> Use Nautilus to try to access the drive

Expected behaviour:
> Nautilus initiates the process, waits until the drive is ready, then displays its contents

Actual behaviour:
> Nautilus initiates the process, times out while waiting for I/O to become ready, and displays an error message
> If tried repeatedly, successive attempts to access the folder causes Nautilus to complain that there is a problem with the drive and that there is no use trying to access it

Workaround using Nautilus:
> Use Nautilus to unmount the drive -- this must be done twice because the first unmount usually fails
> Re-mount the drive
> Start the I/O operations before it goes into power-saving mode again

Another workaround:
> Use the Thunar file manager, which waits while the drive wakes up from low-power mode then continues as expected

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for your report, Which version of Ubuntu are you running? Can you test the same with Hardy? thanks.

[Ryan Prior (ryanprior)]

It works the same in both Gutsy and Hardy, and on both hard installs and LiveCDs.

[wvarner (winshipvarner)]

I also have a Seagate external hard drive and have experienced exactly the same problems using Ubuntu Gusty. Its especially annoying because I end up having to remount the drive several times a day.

[wvarner (winshipvarner)]

Following the instructions here fixed my problem: http://ubuntu-utah.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=494673

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the solution described there is not a nautilus change, seems to be a disk issue