Comment 0 for bug 216483

Binary package hint: ubuntu-desktop

I can not get any kind of USB storage to automount anymore, and I don't know why. This seems to be a common problem, but one that the solutions suggested elsewhere have not worked. I have tried my three USB thumbdrives, in addition to my USB external hard drive all without success.

The drives show up properly in the File Browser, but double-clicking fails without any sort of indication, and right-click and then clicking Mount also fails silently. They show up in /dev/sd*, but do not make it any further. I can confirm that I can mount them manually by

sudo mkdir /media/usbthing
mount /dev/sdf1 /media/usbthing

but this mounts the drive as writable for sudo only, which is a big pain, and really annoying for a friend who I switched to Ubuntu who has the same issue (although on an x32 box, my home machine is x64). I have tried reinstalling HAL, have tried to remove (and then re-add) "usbfree" from the gconf-config volume settings, as well as checking the USB drives for errors in both Windows and Ubuntu, as well as making sure that the drive is properly removed from a Windows machine. Even rebooting with the drive plugged in doesn't work anymore, it still shows up in File Browser but it's the same as if I had just plugged it in.

Outputs requested:
id
uid=1000(rthamilt) gid=1000(rthamilt) groups=4(adm),20(dialout),24(cdrom),25(floppy),29(audio),30(dip),44(video),46(plugdev),104(scanner),108(lpadmin),110(admin),115(netdev),117(powerdev),1000(rthamilt)

id hal
id: hal: No such user

id haldaemon
uid=107(haldaemon) gid=116(haldaemon) groups=116(haldaemon),24(cdrom),25(floppy),46(plugdev),117(powerdev)

uname -a
Linux HomeBox 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 02:46:46 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Attached are the additional outputs from the RemovableStorage bug guide. Thanks for anyone's assistance!