USB flash drive/keyfob will not automount

I am working on an Ubuntu Linux 8.10 system that I do not want to reboot. For some reason, USB flash drives (mass storage devices) now no longer automount. I want to restore that functionality without rebooting. I can manually mount and unmount these things by doing:

cd /media
sudo mkdir thing
sudo mount /dev/sda thing
sudo umount thing
sudo rmdir thing

I don't seem to be able to see the USB drive thing recognized in lsusb:

$ lsusb
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 15ca:00c3 Textech International Ltd. Mini Optical Mouse
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

When I newly attach one of these things, I get this in my dmesg:

[1140463.652040] usb 5-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 32
[1140463.785327] usb 5-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[1140463.786439] scsi29 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[1140463.787213] usb-storage: device found at 32
[1140463.787219] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[1140468.784253] usb-storage: device scan complete
[1140468.784736] scsi 29:0:0:0: Direct-Access CBM  Flash Disk   4.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[1140468.786079] sd 29:0:0:0: [sda] 1019711 512-byte hardware sectors (522 MB)
[1140468.786575] sd 29:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[1140468.786580] sd 29:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
[1140468.786584] sd 29:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
[1140468.787826] sd 29:0:0:0: [sda] 1019711 512-byte hardware sectors (522 MB)
[1140468.788324] sd 29:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[1140468.788330] sd 29:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
[1140468.788333] sd 29:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
[1140468.788340]  sda: sda1
[1140468.789698] sd 29:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk
[1140468.789959] sd 29:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0

But the device never turns up in Nautilus.

Any ideas?

see here
Auto mounting USB devices- http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Udev\#Known\_Problems\_with_Auto-Loading
and HALinfo here- udev - ArchWiki
What is output of

fdisk -l

if flash device is plugged in?

Thanks for your reply techlinux, and thanks for the links which I will read.

By now however I have rebooted the machine, and the problem is gone. Not how I would have liked to resolve the issue, but that's what it is. Still, your links should enable me to work more, and be better equipped if this happens again, so thank you.

good that your problem is not an issue anymore. if you do need to correct this in the future, just restart udev. that should fix you up.

I just had this same issue on Ubuntu 9.04. My USB thumb drive was automounting correctly all day, and I made sure to unmount (eject) before removing it every time, but for whatever reason, it suddenly stopped mounting when I plugged it in.

Thanks to the links provided by techlinux, I learned a bit about HAL, and running "ps aux | grep hal" turned up a line like this:

hald-addon-storage: no polling because /dev/sdc is locked via HAL

With the usb drive unplugged, I restarted HAL, and that fixed the problem, hooray. However, the command is slightly different than specified in the HAL wiki. /etc/rc.d/hal doesn't exist (in fact, /etc/rc.d doesn't exist). This is the command I used:

sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart

Now.. how do we figure out what causes the polling/locked problem in the first place?