unable to unmount usb drives when not root

[gautambatra]

Hi,
I'm fairly new to ubuntu. After upgrading from 9.10 to 10.04 I am unable to unmount usb drives when I'm not root. Every time I have to type "sudo umount /media/... " and give my password. When I right click the drive and click unmount, I get the following message:
Unable to unmount disk1
unmount: /media/disk1 not is not in the fstab (and you are not root)

How can this be solved?

[Mr Gates]

I am also having this exact same issue. I have found that none of my external drives or USB sticks given me the authority to add/delete or modify the files on them.

[tomfin]

Hi,
...After upgrading from 9.10 to 10.04 I am unable to unmount usb drives ... When I right click the drive and click unmount, I get the following message:
Unable to unmount disk1
unmount: /media/disk1 not is not in the fstab (and you are not root)

How can this be solved?

Not solved, but a GUI-based workaround if you just want to eject the disks without using the command line.

Go to "Places" menu and choose "Computer"; this'll show your connected drives, including any that are USB-connected (you'll notice the USB symbol on the drive icons). Right-click the drive and choose "Safely remove drive". This should power down the USB device and unmount any volumes associated with it.

Note this is *not* the same as right-clicking a desktop drive icon and choosing "Unmount" - that would keep the USB device connected if, for example, you then planned on using GParted to repartition an external USB harddisk but had to unmount the partitions first. "Safely remove drive" cuts all power to the USB device and it's not seen again until it's physically replugged.

Same dialog box and message here. Reminds me of a delightful old story (link).


EDIT: In case anyone's paying attention and trying to fix this, I've noticed the perpetually-mounted USB disk behaviour might be related to Nautilus (the Gnome filemanager) being misinformed that the USB disks are in fact fixed internal disks (which rightly *do* have entries in /etc/fstab and therefore are unmountable via right-click). Oddly, killing the nautilus process in system monitor so it restarts itself while the USB disks are still connected changes their desktop icons from standard fixed-disk icons to USB-disk icons, and right-clicking them now rightly gives the "Safely Remove Drive" option instead of the bog-standard "unmount".

In any case, it seems that drives listed under "Computer" in the places menu are mountable/unmountable/removable correctly, and it's just the convenient desktop icons that are misbehaving.

[Handssolow]

Not solved, but a GUI-based workaround if you just want to eject the disks without using the command line.

Go to "Places" menu and choose "Computer"; this'll show your connected drives, including any that are USB-connected (you'll notice the USB symbol on the drive icons). Right-click the drive and choose "Safely remove drive". This should power down the USB device and unmount any volumes associated with it.

Note this is *not* the same as right-clicking a desktop drive icon and choosing "Unmount" - that would keep the USB device connected if, for example, you then planned on using GParted to repartition an external USB harddisk but had to unmount the partitions first. "Safely remove drive" cuts all power to the USB device and it's not seen again until it's physically replugged.

Same dialog box and message here. Reminds me of a delightful old story (link).


EDIT: In case anyone's paying attention and trying to fix this, I've noticed the perpetually-mounted USB disk behaviour might be related to Nautilus (the Gnome filemanager) being misinformed that the USB disks are in fact fixed internal disks (which rightly *do* have entries in /etc/fstab and therefore are unmountable via right-click). Oddly, killing the nautilus process in system monitor so it restarts itself while the USB disks are still connected changes their desktop icons from standard fixed-disk icons to USB-disk icons, and right-clicking them now rightly gives the "Safely Remove Drive" option instead of the bog-standard "unmount".

In any case, it seems that drives listed under "Computer" in the places menu are mountable/unmountable/removable correctly, and it's just the convenient desktop icons that are misbehaving.

thanks tomfin, your edit sheds some more light on this issue with USB sticks. Here's another thread discussing similar issues.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1478368&page=3

[manupaz]

hi,

I have the same problem but I think worst

When my old Ubuntu 9.04 told me to upgrade to 10.04 I accepted without any doubt. Until this moment all my USB storege devices worked fine and with no fail.

After the upgrade, my computer is unable to mount USB disks (500 Mb) or if the device is mounted (Pen drive 16 Gb), I'm not able to write in it.

In addition, I had a folder network shared (Samba) and it's unreacheable too.

I have some files that I need to copy to a USB before formatting the computer and restore the 9.04 Ubuntu version.

Any help?

Thanks a lot.

[TheStroj]

Happened to me also. The upgrade changed my permisions so i was unable to hear sound, mount... Go to Users and Groups and modify your permissions (you will need root passsword for that). When you open it just go to the advenced section and user permissions and select those that you want/need.

[Handssolow]

I selected all user permissions but still when I plug in a USB stick and it mounts, root has permission not me the user. Instead I'm using gksudo nautilus to unmount USB0 for example then close nautilus down. I then open Places, a left click where it shows my USB stick's file system, an icon appears on my Desktop and my USB stick's files can be modified.

But I missed something here, my user id is 1000 but it says "You can't change the user ID when the user is logged in", I'm thinking that 1000 is correct anyway.

When I've finished with the USB stick a right click shows me the option to remove it safely. (It also show eject too, not sure why).

[hihihi100]

Similar problem here:

I can see the plugged external hard drive icon in the desktop, but not under its name (Volume 1), but USB0, I can access the files in the external hard drive and modify them, I can add files and extract files, and Gparted recognizes the external hard drive under its own name (Volume 1). Also, the OS (10.04) recognizes the mount point (in my case, /media/usb0), but cannot show the proper label (Volume 1)... see attached pictures. In the second one, you can see that both "Volume 1" and "/media/usb0" appear as independet USB sticked external hard drives, but I can only access the "/media/usb0" one...

tips please

[pregiopomo]

I've been having the same problem for a while, and I went for the solution posted here (modyfing the etc/fstub) then I finally went to test it with the laptop of a friend that recently installed Ubuntu 10.04, and on his computer everything worked fine.

So I checked out the Synaptic packages he had installed by default, and I realized that I had some more that probably were creating some conflicts/problems.

Now it works again!!

Here is what i did:

- start the "synaptic package manager"
- insert "usb" in the quick search
- compare your installed packages with the following list (these are the one installed by default):

usbmuxd
usbutils
libusbmuxd1
libusb-0.1-4
libusb-1.0-0
xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
libmtp8
usb-creator-gtk
usb-creator-common
libmobiledevice0
libgphoto2-port0
libgphoto2-2
media-player-info
libhpmud0
hpijs
hplip

- remove those packages that have been added by you or that may cause conflicts, in my case I had all the previous ones and I removed the following that I added months ago messing up with my laptop:


usbmount (yep it sound weird, but now is working properly in my laptop!)
pyton usb
usb creator
gnome pilot


I hope this example might help some people as I did received help reading this forum, this is not "THE WAY" you "HAVE TO" follow to solve this problem, but this is just a way that worked for me, and I think is worth to be shared

[consularo]

Pregiopomo... your recommendations worked perfectly here... thanks a lot...