gnome not mounting USB drives

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iwishitwouldwork
Posts: 88
Joined: 2014/02/08 14:56:39

gnome not mounting USB drives

Post by iwishitwouldwork » 2017/12/16 16:25:18

Centos 7, Gnome GUI, all machines are up to date
(ie, yum -y update == "up to date")

this used to work -- i don't know what changed.
when i would insert a usb thumb drive, the drive would
mount and i'd get an icon on the workspace. that no longer
works. i have two machines doing this. (one has no monitor
but the drive would be mounted automatically.) the third
machine still works.

i did systemctl -q | sort on a working and non-working machine
and diff'ed the output. the answer may be there but i didn't
recognize it. i did systemctl --list-unit-files and looked in particular
at the disabled ones (on the non-working machine) but, again, if
the answer was there i didn't recognize it.

online i got the advice:

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modprobe usb_storage
and lsmod | grep usb shows it's in there (as does dmesg)
but it doesn't help. blkid (on the non-working) does not show the
device (the working one does).

i even rebooted (i know, i know) to no avail.

i looked in gnome's applications->system tools->settings and i didn't
see anything that looked relevant.

all of my online searches (maybe for the wrong subject?) have turned
up stuff that didn't seem relevant.

since the drive wasn't being detected (the diode on the drive doesn't flash)
(that's what i thought that diode meant) i did

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echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/$ii/scan
where ii was every directory possible. nope.

i feel like i'm missing something that should be obvious.

j.

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TrevorH
Site Admin
Posts: 33202
Joined: 2009/09/24 10:40:56
Location: Brighton, UK

Re: gnome not mounting USB drives

Post by TrevorH » 2017/12/16 16:47:08

There's a difference between having a device recognised (i.e you need usb_storage loaded) and having it auto-mounted. What is the output from rpm -qa \*gvfs\* ?
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

iwishitwouldwork
Posts: 88
Joined: 2014/02/08 14:56:39

Re: gnome not mounting USB drives

Post by iwishitwouldwork » 2017/12/16 18:06:42

gvfs-client-1.30.4-3.el7.x86_64
gvfs-afp-1.30.4-3.el7.x86_64
gvfs-gphoto2-1.30.4-3.el7.x86_64
gvfs-archive-1.30.4-3.el7.x86_64
gvfs-afc-1.30.4-3.el7.x86_64
gvfs-smb-1.30.4-3.el7.x86_64
gvfs-goa-1.30.4-3.el7.x86_64
gvfs-1.30.4-3.el7.x86_64
gvfs-fuse-1.30.4-3.el7.x86_64
gvfs-mtp-1.30.4-3.el7.x86_64

iwishitwouldwork
Posts: 88
Joined: 2014/02/08 14:56:39

Re: gnome not mounting USB drives

Post by iwishitwouldwork » 2017/12/16 22:26:33

still no joy. i tried moving aside all the directories and files that
i thought could have been involved:

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.ICEauthority   
.TI-trace   
.cache   
.config         
.dbus   
.energia15   
.esd_auth   
.gimp-2.8   
.gnupg   
.gvfs   
.java   
.jssc   
.lesshst   
.local   
.macromedia   
.mozilla   
.nvidia-settings-rc     
.pki   
.python_history 
.thumbnails
.ti
.xdvirc
(yeah, i know some/many of those couldn't be involved, but
this was a quick and dirty test.) moved them aside, rebooted,
logged back in. nope. so i take that to mean that whatever
happened, it happened in some other directory. probably.

FWIW trying to obliterate and then move .cache back into place
is not easy -- even a script a lot like this one will complain that
.cache can't be moved back since .cache is not empty.

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rm -rf .cache
#  this fails:
mv /SAVEDOTFILES/.cache .cache
j.

iwishitwouldwork
Posts: 88
Joined: 2014/02/08 14:56:39

Re: gnome not mounting USB drives -- uh, solved?

Post by iwishitwouldwork » 2017/12/16 22:54:47

did this:

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find /etc -mtime -30
and went through the results. first i discarded everything which
i was convinced could not be relevant and then dug deeper.
never found anything likely.

after all that, it **sort of** looks like it might be a hardware problem.
i had been testing with about 7 usb drives and usb-sd card adapters.
**some** of those **do** show up, some don't, though it seems that
**all** of them do on the machine which i've been calling the "working"
machine. that has me confused....

and to top it all off, the machine which is "broken" is broken on
the front panel USB connectors, but not on the back panel ones.

i guess we should call this operator error.

j.

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