Help mounting USB disks in Ubuntu 18.04?

January 21, 2019 4:19 PM

I was seeing graphics artifacts in Xubuntu 18.04 while using the Nouveau driver. I changed that to the proprietary NVidia driver, then rebooted. When the reboot stalled, I eventually forced the shutdown via power button. Now that I've restarted, I can't see any of my USB drives, udiskie won't start, and "sudo gparted" seems to scan forever without ever showing my disks. Ideas? I need to access my USB drives. Thanks!

A sample of the repeating original message during which I originally had to force-shutdown, after the time limit was reached and still no shutdown:

"A stop job is running for Session c2 of user [username] [30180401.076.002] ata13.15: exception Emask 0x2 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x800400 action 0x6"

Post-reboot, here is the udiskie start error message: https://pastebin.com/DDiCCNiW

Thunar is also delayed at startup by about 30s to 1m and opens without showing any USB devices. I have unplugged my USB devices and plugged them back in, and they still don't show up. Even previously-not-plugged-in devices don't show up when plugged in. I made sure that devices are set to auto-mount when plugged in, in Xubuntu Removable Drives and Media settings.

All advice appreciated, thank you.

posted by circular to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

udiskie is looking for a systemd service file that doesn't exist. Maybe sudo apt remove --purge udiskie then sudo apt install udiskie?

What does dmesg return when you insert a USB device?

I'm guessing you need the additional features of udiskie over the standard just-works automounter?
posted by scruss at 7:30 PM on January 21, 2019 [3 favorites]

Due to your reboot your USB devices that were plugged in weren't cleanly unmounted and udiskie is stoopid. Or something along those lines. The change of graphics drivers should have nothing to do with it.

Unplug devices, boot, open a terminal, do a 'sudo -i' to get a root shell. Do a 'dmesg'. Then plug in the devices and wait a few seconds and do 'dmesg' again. The info will be at the end. Sorta like this:

[5634159.049479] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 83 using xhci_hcd
[5634159.509570] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=058f, idProduct=6387
[5634159.509577] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[5634159.509582] usb 1-1: Product: Mass Storage Device
[5634159.509587] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: JetFlash
[5634159.509591] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: YPRTN4G9ZIYM
[5634159.544965] usb-storage 1-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[5634159.545259] scsi host8: usb-storage 1-1:1.0
[5634159.545464] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
[5634159.548859] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas
[5634160.577540] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access     JetFlash TS8GJFV30        8.01 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[5634160.588268] scsi 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[5634160.592877] sd 8:0:0:0: [sda] 15974400 512-byte logical blocks: (8.18 GB/7.62 GiB)
[5634160.593065] sd 8:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[5634160.593073] sd 8:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
[5634160.593295] sd 8:0:0:0: [sda] No Caching mode page found
[5634160.593305] sd 8:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
[5634160.595273]  sda: sda1
[5634160.596534] sd 8:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk

Then you want to just do something like:

root@gaz:~# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
root@gaz:~# df /mnt
Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1        7970592 5355584   2615008  68% /mnt
root@gaz:~# umount /mnt

But is also sounds like udiskie is stoopid.... see above. :)
posted by zengargoyle at 9:27 PM on January 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks for those answers, I gave that a shot.

Reinstalling udiskie with the purge option doesn't seem to have helped. Here's something else I noticed: All of a sudden my USB wifi card wasn't working and I couldn't connect to the internet.

The USB wifi card is plugged into a PCI USB 3.0 card, this model. I plugged the USB cable into my normal USB 2.0 port and wifi was up and working again.

Here's what I got from dmesg when I plugged in a USB thumb drive. I don't think there's enough info here to manually mount it, but let me know if I'm wrong. I'm including in the paste some dmesg output from before and after the thumb drive was plugged in, so you can see--there's something else going on I think? I believe it may be with the PCI USB 3.0 card above. The card has been working like a champ for a few months now. Before the latest power-on I reseated the four-pin-to-SATA power connection to this card and that doesn't seem to have helped with anything.

Dmesg output:

https://pastebin.com/SLt3GEiv

Thanks for the assistance--this is so above my head but I'm willing to try just about anything. :-)

Edit: In case it's helpful, lspci output.
posted by circular at 11:30 AM on January 22, 2019

That "SATA link up/down" stuff is awfully close to what you get with a failing hard drive. So maybe packages like udiskie aren't really installed and are crapping out?

The real giveaway is when you start getting errors like "ls: command not found": that's a bad system disk and no mistake.

(you don't need sudo for dmesg on Linux, we're not Mac users …)
posted by scruss at 1:23 PM on January 22, 2019 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks! OK, so things work again now after 1) I removed my (not working anyway) PCI SATA controller, and 2) moved the USB 3.0 card to that other, now-unused PCI slot. Dmesg does give me a few "run fsck please" notes on a couple partitions, so I'll do that.

I'm not sure if there's some "just move to another PCI slot principle" at work here--maybe I should try plugging the PCI SATA controller back into the USB card's old slot, to see if it will work again?!

Thanks for all the help with this one.
posted by circular at 1:41 PM on January 22, 2019 [1 favorite]