I had the same problem for a long time. For me it was not necessarily happening for USB devices, but I did find that IDE and SATA hard disks were doing this. Eventually I found that I had manually updated the /etc/fstab file incorrectly. The entry I had that was causing the problem was:
I had the same problem for a long time. For me it was not necessarily happening for USB devices, but I did find that IDE and SATA hard disks were doing this. Eventually I found that I had manually updated the /etc/fstab file incorrectly. The entry I had that was causing the problem was:
/dev/sdb1 /media/Backup/ ntfs-3g defaults, locale= en_US.UTF- 8 0 0
but the correct line should be:
/dev/sdb1 /media/Backup ntfs-3g defaults, locale= en_US.UTF- 8 0 0
I had an extra slash on the end of the mount directory!
Hope this helps someone.