Strange USB storage issues in 15.10

Support & Help Requests
1

Hello everyone,

I have a System 76 Sable all-in one computer (love it) that I’ve been using with Debian since I bought it. I recently installed Ubuntu MATE 15.10 since it has newer software, but I may be regretting my decision. For some reason, USB storage devices randomly stop working in MATE. When I first boot the PC, everything is fine, I put in a USB stick or USB hard disk, and Caja opens right up or at least gives me an option to mount the drive. But at some point, Caja loses its ability to recognize that I’ve inserted a USB disk. When this happens, the disk won’t even show up in Caja on the list of attached devices. After rebooting, it works again, but only for a while.

Whenever this happens, I can see in /var/log/syslog that the USB storage device was recognized, and I can manually mount it via shell commands. So it almost seems as though this is a MATE issue. I haven’t found a way to reproduce this though, at some point, MATE randomly stops seeing USB storage devices.

Another thing that has happened once is that I disconnected and reconnected my keyboard, and then at that point, keyboard and mouse support fcompletely died and I had to restart my machine via ssh. Not sure that’s related though.

Has anyone else had this problem?

2

Could it be an ACPI problem ? The USB drive goes to sleep after a certain time of inactivity ?

Read https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management#Userspace_tools
search for “USB autosuspend”, you could add a udev rule to blacklist the device from autosuspend.

Regards,
BT

3

Possibly - but the strange thing here is that I am able to manually mount USB drives via the shell. It seems as though it’s the MATE desktop that loses track of USB devices after a while.

4

I have a related problem.
I was using LMDE without issues like that on my dell laptop, with ubuntu-mate when I copy files into an usb drive with ntfs file system and I eject it, some files are corrupted.