Trouble with mounting USB drives

[john connor]

Hello,
I'm having trouble with my mount points here. Originally the thumb drives would auto detect and I'd get an Icon in computer that I could click. I tried to reformat a thumb drive with gparted and I guess it unmounted my drive. I tried re mounting it, which I can now see the drive and access it, but I can no longer use the icon in Computer. It says unable to mount in location. Can't mount file. Is there a link that has to be done to show where the mount point is or something? FYI, as if it's not obvious, I'm a complete noob to linux. Thanks in advance for your help!!!!!

 

[Tolkem]

Hello,
I'm having trouble with my mount points here. Originally the thumb drives would auto detect and I'd get an Icon in computer that I could click. I tried to reformat a thumb drive with gparted and I guess it unmounted my drive. I tried re mounting it, which I can now see the drive and access it, but I can no longer use the icon in Computer. It says unable to mount in location. Can't mount file. Is there a link that has to be done to show where the mount point is or something? FYI, as if it's not obvious, I'm a complete noob to linux. Thanks in advance for your help!!!!!

Fisrt, welcome to the forum
When doing whatever it is you want to with any drive, you need to umount it first, always! So yes, gparted umounted your drive before formating it. Did you reformat your drive? didn't you? Sounds like you tried to but stopped the process when you noticed it was umounted, is that right? If that's the case, plug the drive in, open gparted, right-click on it and select umount then try reformating it again. In any case, I think reformating the drive once more should solve it, so you might try that.

 

[john connor]

The problem I have is this does that for all drives that I insert now.

 

[dos2unix]

How are you formatting them? With windows?

 

[john connor]

I'm under impression fat32 is most universal so thats what I was going to use. Only one flash drive had this done, the others have data and have not been touched, and yet they still don't read when inserted.

 

[dos2unix]

You can also try this. Open a terminal console.
Be careful here, you can erase your whole drive if you type the wrong command.

insert your USB drive.
type the command below.

sudo dmesg

thousands of lines of text will scroll by.
but at the very bottom, you should see something similar to this.

[ 2232.174963] usb-storage 4-4:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[ 2232.175100] scsi host5: usb-storage 4-4:1.0
[ 2233.237689] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access Kingston DataTraveler 3.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[ 2233.238040] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
[ 2233.238325] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdd] 30218842 512-byte logical blocks: (15.5 GB/14.4 GiB)
[ 2233.238496] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
[ 2233.238498] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 4f 00 00 00
[ 2233.238657] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdd] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 2233.256079] sdd: sdd1 sdd2
[ 2233.258013] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk
[ 2233.437739] ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3
[ 2233.440305] ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3
[ 2233.444393] ISO 9660 Extensions: RRIP_19

Notice my output above says [sdd] several places.
Yours will likely be different. It might say [sdb] or [sdc] or possibly something else.
Since I don't know what it will be, we will just use sdd as an example. Change sdd
in the commands below to whatever matches your output from the dmesg command.

type in the commands below. (remember don't dont use sdd, unless it is correct)

sudo umount /dev/sdd
sudo fdisk /dev/sdd
o
w

those last two commands, are simply the letter "o" (lowercase)
followed by the letter "w" (lowercase)

Now type this command (remember not to use sdd, unless it is correct)
sudo mkfs.vfat -F32 /dev/sdd

That might take a couple of seconds.
When it is done... use this command. (remember it might not be be sdd)

mount /dev/sdd /mnt

If that all works without any errors. Your USB is formatted and mounted now.