Mount USB drive on Ubuntu: "Not Authorized"

Question

I'm having some problems with my Ubuntu 11.10 installation on a Toshiba A300-16l laptop, of which the primary problem appears to be allowing permissions escalation.

I want to backup my home directory before reinstalling Ubuntu, but I can't seem to get my USB stick mounted. Each time I plug it in, I get the following error:

Unable to mount USB DISK
Not Authorized

The device shows up with lsusb as "Kingston Techonlogy Company Inc.", and dmesg | tail gives:

 sdb: sdb1
sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 8:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

Attempting to mount it manually gives:

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/sdb
$ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /mnt/sdb
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

Finally, dmesg | tail gives:

FAT-fs (sdb): invalid media value (0xb9)
FAT-fs (sdb): Can't find a valid FAT filesystem

Is there any hope of getting this working?

Answer 1

The dmesg information is reasonable; the media value for FAT32 should be 0x0b.

You might want to try /dev/sdb1. USB mass storage is used for both harddisks and flash. Since harddisks traditionally had partitions, and flash didn't, there's no sure way to predict if a given USB device will have a partition table.