Looking at a Gutsy system I found what has changed. On gutsy udev would assign group rights of "plugdev" to USB portable storage, and Hardy is assigning "disk".
It looks like the following line in /etc/udev/rules.d/40-permissions.rules is the culprit: ATTRS{type}=="0", GROUP="disk" This line is new in Hardy. After commenting it out I now get the expected permissions: brw-rw---- 1 root plugdev 8, 16 2008-04-29 11:06 /dev/sdb brw-rw---- 1 root plugdev 8, 17 2008-04-29 11:06 /dev/sdb1 -- Receive kio_media_mounthelper error when removing usb device https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/217550 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs