Unable to mount USB disk under Debian
	Part X. Debian (sometimes also Ubuntu)

Unable to mount USB disk under Debian

Jurjen Bokma

September 2008

Somebody after inserting a USB stick into their PC gets the pop-up message:

Figure 1. HAL mount error message

A pop-up box with the text: A security policy in place prevents this sender from sending this message to this recipient, see message bus configuration file (rejected message had interface "org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume" member "Mount" error name "(unset)" destination "org .freedesktop.Hal").

scsi 10:0:0:0: Direct-Access TOSHIBA MK3252GSX PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] 625142448 512-byte hardware sectors (320073 MB) sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 38 00 00 sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] 625142448 512-byte hardware sectors (320073 MB) sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 38 00 00 sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through sdb: sdb2 < sdb5 sdb6 > sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk sd 10:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0

And ls -l /dev/sdb* gives:

brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 16 2008-10-06 15:43 /dev/sdb brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 18 2008-10-06 15:43 /dev/sdb2 brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 21 2008-10-06 15:43 /dev/sdb5 brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 22 2008-10-06 15:43 /dev/sdb6

So seeing that the group 'floppy' owns the devices, I added a section to /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf reading:

	      <!-- You can change this to a more suitable user, or make per-group -->
 	        <policy group="floppy">
	        <allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume"/>
	      </policy>

Then I added to /etc/security/group.conf the following:

	      mount; :0 ;*;*;floppy


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