[vox-tech] usb stick stopped mounting

[Tony Cratz]

Alex Mandel wrote:
> It's odd, but one of my usb sticks stopped mounting automatically and in 
> fact doesn't want to work at all.
> 
> dmesg gives:
> [  724.103868] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Device not ready: Sense Key : Not Ready 
> [current]
> [  724.103871] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Device not ready: Add. Sense: Medium 
> not present
> [  724.103874] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 32
> 
> Other usb drives are working fine, and this stick still works fine on 
> windows too. fdisk, mount, gparted all fail to see /dev/sdb
> 
> There are 2 things I can think of that might have caused the error. The 
> first is that I was running applications off the drive through wine. 
> Specifically portableapps.com , maybe I didn't unmount it cleanly or 
> something although I'm sure I shut down wine and did a normal unmount 
> before removing it.
> 
> Option 2 is somehow installing Virtualbox has screwed with it or the usb 
>   drive mounting rules.
> 
> Any ideas where to even start, I would backup and reformat if I thought 
> I could but without it mounting that doesn't exactly make that possible.


	In the past when I tried to install Virtualbox and get USB
	working I had problems. But you say the other USB drives
	are working fine (with Virtualbox). Therefore the chance that
	Virtualbox is the problem is small.

	Is this a dual file system drive or is it all a NTFS partition?
	If it all NTFS you might try 'ntfsfix' to clean it (think fsck).
	That may solve your problem.

	You also said gparted failed to see it. Is it that it does not
	see the partition at all?

	How about other systems? Do they see it?


							Tony