USB Mounting Problems in KDE

calendar Dec 20, 2007 · kde Linux usb

Today I plugged in a USB flash drive (after updating 40 or so packages in Gentoo, including HAL) and received this error in a popup:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda, missing
codepage or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog -
try dmesg | tail or so

Looking at dmesg reveals:

FAT: Unrecognized mount option “flush” or missing value

Seems that a new parameter has been added to HAL’s VFAT handling system (apparently it flushes data from the USB bus to make working with USB flash media better) which is not supported in kernels lower than version 2.6.19. The solution is either to upgrade to a later kernel, or a quick fix is to comment out the line

flush

in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/20-storage-methods.fdi (on Gentoo, other distributions may place this file in a different place)