the empty quarter

After upgrading from Xubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) to 9.04 (Jaunty), the automount feature stopped working for a particular USB memory stick. It wasn’t even listed when I ran commands like

sudo fdisk -l

and

more /proc/partitions

But interestingly, when I plugged in my camera via a USB cable, the memory card inside it was automounted, and even the troublesome USB stick was then recognized and mounted!

The solution turned out to be manually updating the initramfs image of the new kernel 2.6.28-11 installed as part of the Jaunty upgrade. After running the command below and rebooting the machine, the USB stick is now recognized and automounted immediately after inserting it.

sudo update-initramfs -u -k uname -r

Note the backward quotes in the above command.