Member Avatar for HLA91

Hi all

I was messing around on my laptop which running WattOS, which is a remaster of Ubuntu in case you haven’t heard of it.
I plugged in my usb stick and I wanted to format it and I used GParted and I noticed in the list there was ext3 so I thought i would give it a try I normally use Fat-something.

I formatted the stick but then upon trying to mount it within PCMan file manager I get "Unable to mount device: The enclosing drive for the volume is locked" I unplugged and replugged the Stick but same thing, and then I formatted as fat32 but still nothing.

I decided to plug it into my windows machine and it came up "Do you wish to format etc". I allowed it to and then i could open it in windows fine but back to Linux and same old thing "Unable to mount device: The enclosing drive for the volume is locked".

I can mount the drive manually and unmount it manually and create files on it via the shell but graphically i cannot mount, unmount or create any files or drag and drop onto it. I just tried another USB stick and same problem and I havent formatted or played with the other one.

Can anyone help me please?

Many thanks

HLA91

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by aditya.miet

Dani AI

Generated

Short guide (for future readers) — if you can mount the stick from a shell but PCManFM shows "The enclosing drive for the volume is locked", the kernel and filesystem are probably fine. The problem is usually in the userland stack that the file manager uses (gvfs / udisks / PolicyKit) or a process holding the block device open. Steps below diagnose and fix the common cases.

Quick checks (run after inserting the stick)

dmesg | tail -n 40
lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL,MODEL
mount | grep -E '/dev/sd|/dev/hd'
sudo lsof /dev/sdb /dev/sdb1     # or: sudo fuser -v /dev/sdb1
ps ax | egrep "gvfs|udisks|polkit|lxpolkit"
ls -la ~/.gvfs
ls -la /run/user/$(id -u)/gvfs

What to look for: a process holding /dev/sdX, an already-mounted partition, or no running PolicyKit authentication agent (on LXDE you need lxpolkit or policykit-gnome so PCManFM can get elevated privileges).

Common fixes

  • If a process holds the device: stop it (identify with lsof/fuser) or unmount that mountpoint.
  • Restart gvfs/udisks or the authentication agent:
    killall gvfsd gvfsd-fuse udisksd  # safe test; they will respawn in many setups
ps ax | egrep "polkit|lxpolkit|polkit-gnome"
  • Try mounting via the same backend the file manager uses:
    udisks --mount /dev/sdb1        # older udisks
udisksctl mount -b /dev/sdb1    # udisks2
  • If no polkit agent is running, install/start one (Debian/Ubuntu family example):
    sudo apt-get install --reinstall gvfs gvfs-backends udisks policykit-1-gnome lxpolkit
  • If partition table looks flaky, refresh it:
    sudo partprobe /dev/sdb
sudo partx -u /dev/sdb

    Last-resort (destructive): wipe the partition table only after double-checking the device path:

    sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1

    (Warning: destroys all data.)

Because could mount from the shell, focus first on polkit/gvfs/udisks and processes that keep the device busy. Note: ’s post in this thread discusses VM time drift and is unrelated to the USB-mount issue.

Member Avatar for aditya.miet

Hi Dear

Tell me the Scenoria which m facing Regards Linux

i am using a window server on which i had installed 5 VmWare Linux machine;when i access on those machine there time is decreasing

like i set the time through date command 5:00 AM according to mine real time
aftr an hour if i,ll see whats time is there on limux machine 5:45

Can any1 help me to out this struggling Problem

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