Is anyone else having issues with external USB drives since the rebase to 24.04? This appears to be limited to Seagate drives, I think. More details coming soon if needed as I need to do some more testing.
Edit: A WD external drive works without issue. Various memory keys are also fine. The same problem exists on a second machine with a fresh install on latest neon. I did a live boot with Debian 12.8 and all works as expected. It rather looks like a combination of 24.04 and Seagate externals.
Edit: The error message in Dolphin says: āAn error occurred while accessing āSG4ā, the system responded: The requested operation has failed: Error mounting /dev/sda2 at /media/username/Seagate: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda2, missing codepage or helper program, or other errorā
A good thought but unlikely. The Seagates were all working fine until the 24.04 upgrade on the netbook. The laptop is only days old so has only had a fresh install of neon. If I boot either with a Debian live USB stick then all the drives work fine on both machines.
Searching āubuntu 24.04 ntfs changesā led to these links:
Where the following solution was proposed - basically, disabling one version of kernel drivers that can be used for NTFS partitions to force the other to be used:
echo 'blacklist ntfs3' | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/disable-ntfs3.conf
Iām not on an Ubuntu-based system myself so I canāt try this personally, but it might be helpful to at least tackle accessing the NTFS partition?
Many thanks, @johnandmegh, I shall have a good read.
I have been doing extra testing to narrow this down and the results are in:
Both machines running a live Debian image will happily read and write to all three drives.
Both machines running the installed latest neon wonāt and just gives the same error message.
An extensive test of many, many USB memory sticks indicates that most will mount and work correctly. The exception is a 512GB SanDisk which wonāt mount unless you leave it connected, walk away for an hour, come back and it has automagically mounted.
Meanwhile the 1TB Western Digital keeps on trucking.
One thing that could narrow it down - do the same symptoms exhibit themselves when using a āstockā Ubuntu Desktop Noble Numbat 24.04 live image?
If so, then you could pretty effectively rule out things unique to Neon, or even to your specific install, as it would seem to be inherent to something in the Ubuntu kernel / driver choices.
If not, then it might be something specific to Neon somehow?
Ok, using ubuntu-24.04.1-desktop-amd64 I have the same issue as with neon. The Seagate drives just wonāt play ball. Every other drive, no matter what type, manufacturer or file system, works as expected.
I also tried booting a different kernel but no matter what I tried it wouldnāt bring up that menu. Every other menu but the one I want. I tried escape, right shift, left shift, voodoo chanting but nothing. Is this bug filing time?
Well, although itās a pain for your actual installed OS at the moment, this is actually good news diagnostically - it means thereās nothing unique about your specific configuration of KDE Neon thatās causing your issue, because the issue must lie upstream with how Ubuntu / its kernels / its configuration is interacting with your hardware.
That means itās more likely that someone else could reproduce this issue - itās almost guaranteed, unless thereās somehow a connection between an impending fault in your hardware and a software issue that is only manifesting first in Ubuntu 24.04, but not elsewhere.
If that doesnāt match your situation with the NTFS drive, then yes, itād seem like thereās a bug there thatās worth reporting distinctly, also on Canonicalās Launchpad site (they wouldnāt support KDE Neon itself, but you could file the bug against Ubuntu 24.04.1 since you saw the same issue there as well, and not on other distributions). The ext3 drive likely is its own separate bug report, as well.
(Both of those would be upstream with Ubuntu since KDE Neon is inheriting those types of core operating system components - like the Linux kernel and its filesystem drivers/modules - from its Ubuntu base)
Thanks, this helps hugely. I had a read of the links you sent and it all looks rather familiar.
What I did in the end as a workaround to get me past this roadblock was install Debian 12 on the new lappy and did all the file management I needed to do. I will now reinstall neon and start documenting this for a bug report.
On a side note, Iāll probably also buy another external drive, format it to ext3, copy one of the NTFS drives to that, then format that to ext3 and see what occurs. If it solves the problem Iāll do the other drives too.
Many thanks, @astevec. I rebuilt the new laptop last night with neon testing (first time user) and will try your suggestion in a while. (My better half is WFH today and has commandeered the office).
I tried this on both machines and sadly nothing changed. Iāll pick up another Seagate drive at the weekend and do the copy/format shuffle and see whether those two NTFS drives start working in neon again. That will hopefully nail this.