Tue Dec 1 20:10:39 UTC 2009

IronKey and Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic

I've just plugged a new IronKey into my Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic laptop. The key mounts fine, gives me a volume to browse, and I can see the program I need to execute to set it up …

However, initialisation fails :-

    /media/IronKey: No such file or directory
    /linux/IronKey-TermsOfUse.txt: No such file or directory
    Initialization aborted
    Hit return to exit

This behaviour is caused by a change in U9.10, have a look at Launchpad #446897 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/util-linux/+bug/446897

Basically, the IronKey volume label is really “IronKey ” (i.e. lots of trailing spaces). Earlier versions of Ubuntu automatically stripped these spaces off the mount point name, but the function used for getting label names has been upgraded to allow UTF8 labels on non-CD storage, and this new function doesn't strip spaces.

    $ sudo blkid /dev/sr1
    /dev/sr1: LABEL="IronKey         " TYPE="iso9660"

A cheap workaround is to create a symlink for the IronKey, and to invoke the IronKey program by hand through that. Be careful though, tab-completion is difficult with the original IronKey filename.

    $ sudo ln -s "/media/IronKey         " /media/IronKey
    $ sudo /media/IronKey/linux/ironkey

This will allow the setup to complete and format the “IronKey USB” volume. This is a VFAT filesystem, and we don't get any problems with the name.

So we can now create a desktop shortcut to invoke the ironkey setup program through the symlink. When you upgrade to a version of Ubuntu that has fixed this issue, you might have to remove the symlink; but the chances are everything will work properly out of the box …