Media devices not mounting (CD/DVD, SD Card etc)
 

I feel kind of silly asking this as I have been using Linux long enough that I should know this. Just a few days ago I noticed that my media such as CD/DVD and usb stick stopped mounting automatically in Gnome when I inserted them. I just mount them manually and didn't really worry about it. But today I need to mount my SD card and I have no idea how to mount it, what package generally handles auto mounting devices in Ubuntu? What do I need to do to manually mount an SD card, what is the standard name of the device and what is the normal type for SD cards. It is of photos from a Cannon PSA630 if that helps.

Sorry to ask such an should be known question, it is just one of those things that has always worked and I never needed to know how it worked. Thanks for any help anyone can provide.

George

I had something similar happen to me a while ago. Does it automount when you first boot the system up? Mine would work fine until after the first mount- the problem was a bad CDROM drive pulling everything else down with it.

I rebooted and it did mount on initial boot. I unmounted and it would not automatically remount. So I will have to do some digging to find out if it is some faulty hardware, I will start with the CD/DVD drive. Thanks for your help.

Not a problem- keep us posted on what you find.

A couple quick things you can check. Make sure that you don't boot with the "noacpi" boot option. That can prevent 3 daemons from running that automounting depend on, hald, udevd & dbusd.

Before inserting an external device, open up a console and run "sudo tail -f /var/log/messages". Is the device and the partition both detected? The device will be assigned a node that looks like /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc. The first partition will be assigned a device node like /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdc1. Sometimes there is a reason the device wasn't mounted automatically and this reason is printed out in the messages log.

If you logged out improperly, after a crash, or by using [ctrl]-[alt]-[backspace] instead of logging out, there could be a stale /media/.hal-mtab or /media/.hal-mtab-lock file. (Ubuntu may do this differently). If nothing is mounted in /media, you should be able to delete these files.

If the usb drive was unplugged before the cached writes were unloaded to the device, the filesystem may be corrupt. In that case, either the kernel won't recognise the partition, or automounting failed. This is similar to the bad-device possibility of the above post, but the filesystem is bad rather than the device itself.

I'm not certain, but I think on Ubuntu, you need to be a member of the hotplug group for automounting to be attempted. Could membership have changed.

Sometimes not all usb ports are created equally. You could try a different port. The most common problem is that a certain port doesn't supply enough power. A highspeed device may not work well on a port because the hub is being shared with a usb 1.0 device.

On my system, an entry in /etc/fstab for node will prevent automounting, because it seems that you want the device mounted somewhere else. Ubuntu on the other hand may be configured to modify /etc/fstab. If the device isn't mounted but an entry in /etc/fstab exists from when it was plugged in last, this may cause problems. This may have the same effect as a stale /media/.hal-mtab or /media/.hal-mtab-lock file. ( The entry in /etc/fstab serves the same purpose)

Good Luck!