USB mount problem

English Install/Boot/Login
1

All,

I have broken something,>:( and would like help to fix it – I was trying to set a particular mount point for my USB drive (via Nautilus, I believe) and made the mistake of putting a full path name so that now I get Cannot mount volue alert reporting that
G_DIR_SEPARATOR is the problem.

I get this error as soon as I plug in the device and don’t seem to be able to find where to ‘undo’ this. Help?

I can mount it manually, but as root, and dmesg doesn’t report anything amiss. I can’t find anything in my fstab that should be resonible (pasted below).

I have searched, but the posts don’t specifically tell me how to undo it (and I have too many fires to spend the rest of the day hunting, so your patience and help is GREATLY appreciated).

spottedowl

2

I thought the emoticon was a red faced embarrassed one, but it looks more angry. While I am frustrated, I didn’t mean it to look like that.

I also said that I would paste in my fstab which I didn’t – so here:

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-SAMSUNG_HD160JJP_S0DFJ1HL827407-part1 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-SAMSUNG_HD160JJP_S0DFJ1HL827407-part2 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-SAMSUNG_HD160JJP_S0DFJ1HL827407-part3 /home ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 2
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0

3

Such external usb devices are not mounted in fstab, so forget looking there.
These devices should auto mount in /media

It’s not helpful that you can’t really remember what you were doing.

What location were you trying to make a permanent mount to? Were you following a guide or just winging it?

4

Thanks for the reply. (I know that my detail was somewhat lacking:).

As for what I was doing (winging it) – I am using the USB to xfer a application from the PC to an embedded device running linux. I grew weary using Nautilus to have the USB mounted so that I could find it, and was hunting through Nautilus to find out where it was really mounted. I found /media/kingston and wanted to make that ‘permanent’ and there was an entry via Nautilus (I’m 90% sure) that allowed me to specify a place to mount it. I stupidly put a slash in the name (e.g., /media/USB) and now it is hosed. Everytime I plug in the USB device, it complains about the G_DIR_SEPARATOR error.

I (would like to) believe that there is config file somewhere that I can edit to remove the damage that I have done – is there? where?

Thanks to all – I really appreciate it. I was / am rather frustrated and angry with myself over pilot error, but would really appreciate any help to revert the damage.

Thanks!

-spottedowl

5

Without the device plugged in what do you see in /media ?

6

I see .hal-mtab .hal-mtab-lock KINGSTON KINGSTON_

the device I was trying to mount had previously displayed (in Nautilus) as “RCA”
The .hal* files are empty (0 bytes).

thanks for your help.

7

Open a terminal:

cat /etc/mtab

post here

8

cat /etc/mtab yields:

/dev/sda2 / ext3 rw,acl,user_xattr 0 0
/proc /proc proc rw 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs rw 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw 0 0
udev /dev tmpfs rw 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/sda3 /home ext3 rw,acl,user_xattr 0 0
securityfs /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw 0 0
fusectl /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw 0 0
none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw 0 0
nfsd /proc/fs/nfsd nfsd rw 0 0
gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/rz/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,user=rz 0 0

9

All I get is: .hal-mtab-lock

su terminal:

cd /media

mv .filename .filename_old

do that to both files (filename = eg: .hal-mtab-lock)

becomes : .hal-mtab-lock_old

I’m not sure this will sort it, but we can always reverse the rename

10

no observable effect.
I rebooted, the files were gone (even the *_old versions).
I inserted the USB device, got the error message and the .hal-mtab-lock file returned. deleting that file and re-inserting the device resulted in same error G_DIR_SEP…

Thanks for your help and patience!

11

Can you format the device and give it a different volume name? Maybe you have a windows pc you can do that with?

12

I’ll give that a try tomorrow – gotta run now.
Thank you for your help (have I said thank you yet?:).

::so::

13

That didn’t help – it still won’t mount. I’ll just ‘re-purpose’ that one and use another.

Thank you (very much) for your attention, help, and patience.

::so::

14

Use mtools to set your USB key volume name without needing to reformat it, set the name without any fancy characters (especially not a slash) - I suggest “disk” and then it should mount OK.

I suspect you’ve somehow named the USB key /foo/bar or whatever.

If you can reformat it, do a man mkfs.vfat and set the volume name when you format the USB key.