USB Storage drive fails to mount

[Vortex Cortex]

Upon fresh installation of Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) Inserting a USB storage device causes it to mount automatically.

After about 2 days and several reboots no USB storage devices can be mounted.

The USB drive appears in the "Places" menu, but will not mount.

An error dialog states: "Invalid mount option"

I traced the problem to my /etc/fstab file:

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sdb1
UUID=4bffd628-caac-4c1b-b55c-806a039d19bc / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/sdb5
UUID=5c8e9f6a-b5ce-444a-bbe6-29325fa41d05 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/scd1 /media/cdrom2 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

I have a backup of my /etc/fstab file from the fresh installed state:

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sdb1
UUID=4bffd628-caac-4c1b-b55c-806a039d19bc / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/sdb5
UUID=5c8e9f6a-b5ce-444a-bbe6-29325fa41d05 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/scd1 /media/cdrom2 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

Note:
The backed up fstab file does not contain the following line:
/dev/sdc1 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

This line was not added by me, and I have not installed any new packages or applications at or before the time of this problem.

Commenting or removing this line from the fstab file fixes the problem and allows the USB drive to be mounted again.

I suspect that leaving the usb drive plugged in and then rebooting caused the additional mounting instruction to be added to the fstab file upon boot.

Workaround: Unmount and unplug any external usb drives BEFORE booting or re-booting Ubuntu.

This exact issue has occurred with both my Laptop as well as my Desktop both running the same Ubuntu release (8.04)

[Shirish Agarwal (shirishag75)]

try adding the following to your /etc/fstab

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs defaults 0 0
 0 0 0 0 0

If that solves your problem then most probably its duplicate of bug 156085