External FAT32 Hard Drive takes excessive time to open in Nautilus

[Scott Ritchie]

Binary package hint: nautilus

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha 4
Nautilus 1:2.27.91-0ubuntu1

When plugged in through usb port my external 1tb Hard Drive (W95 FAT32) mounts and is displayed on desktop. Double clicking the icon to open or going through the Nautilus explorer it takes more than a minute to open and display the contents.
It worked fine in jaunty, and accessing the hard drive through the terminal works fine.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please try to obtain a backtrace following the instructions at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash and upload the backtrace (as an attachment) to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the stacktrace should give details on where it's blocking, could you also try using gvfs-ls and see if it's as slow as nautilus?

[Scott Ritchie (sritchie)]

I followed the instructions on obtaining a backtrace, but gdb didnt report any errors, but it did say it finished running the program as soon as the actual interface for nautilus opened.
I tried gvfs-ls and that works instantly, as does regular navigation through terminal.
It only takes a long time to open in nautilus the first time you open the drive after its mounted, so maybe it's trying to index the whole drive the first time its opened?
I mounted my 80gb Ipod as well which is VFAT 32, and it was much faster (took 2 seconds rather than the extensive amount of time for my 1tb external hard drive)
However my 4gb Ipod Mini took substantially longer to open than the 80gb Ipod - so it doesnt appear to only be related to the size of the drive.

[Matt Gibbins (mgibbins)]

I'm having similar problems with a Western Digital 1TB USB drive. When I try to open it in Nautilus the drive light flashes but no window opens. Also in a terminal tab completions don't work when attempting file operations. Though ls does show listing and it is possible to copy and create files.
Attached is the dmesg output with messages associated with the launching of Nautilus on the USB drive.
Hope this is helpful.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

could you try if that's still an issue in karmic or lucid?

[agnul (sucrabu)]

Same problem here running 10.10 and connecting a 250Gb Packard-Bell drive.

[agnul (sucrabu)]

Elaborating a bit on my previous command: after plugging in the external drive (250Gb fat32) the drive icon appears on the desktop immediately, the drive is mounted and accessible from the terminal and/or using gvfs-ls. Double clicking the drive's icon causes some system disk activity but no nautilus window opens, no error messages, no crashes or stacktraces. Double clicking again on the drive's icon a file manager window eventually opens. If I "safely remove", unplug and plug in the drive again I can open a file manger window double clicking the drive's icon just once.

[agnul (sucrabu)]

Oh, just one more thing: if instead of double clicking the icon i right-click and chose "Open" everything works.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The bug is old and Ubuntu changed quite a lot since, there has also been no activity here nor similar reports. Closing since we believe the issue as described is deprecated but feel free to file a new report if you still have problems in recent Ubuntu versions.