[Hardware] External hard drives can't be mounted through interface after upgrade to 25.10

[ankama]

After upgrading from 25.04 to 25.10 I can no longer mount my external hard drives through the interface. (mounting them with sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/my/folder works). The drive is detected correctly. When I click on 'mount and open' there's a spinning wheel for about 1-2minutes. If I remove the drive at any point during this period, a sudo-prompt will pop up to authorize. However if I don't remove the drive, no popup shows up and it fails silently or fails saying 'you are not authorised to mount this drive'.

I have this issue with 2 external hard drives on 2 machines with 25.10. They were mounting fine before I upgraded (one machine from 25.04, the other from 24.10) and the drives work fine on windows. The drives are 2TB drives and formatted in exFAT I believe. Any idea what may have changed?

EDIT: So I may have found a first hint, when I run lhsw it detects the drive as NTFS:

            *-usb
                  description: Mass storage device
                  product: PSSD T7
                  vendor: Samsung
                  physical id: 2
                  bus info: usb@2:2
                  logical name: scsi0
                  version: 1.00
                  serial: S5T7NJ0R100171F
                  capabilities: usb-3.20 scsi
                  configuration: driver=uas maxpower=896mA speed=10000Mbit/s
                *-disk
                     description: SCSI Disk
                     product: PSSD T7
                     vendor: Samsung
                     physical id: 0.0.0
                     bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
                     logical name: /dev/sda
                     version: 0
                     serial: F171001R0JN7T5S
                     size: 1863GiB (2TB)
                     capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
                     configuration: ansiversion=6 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 signature=b6df8dd6
                   *-volume
                        description: HPFS/NTFS partition
                        physical id: 1
                        bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1
                        logical name: /dev/sda1
                        capacity: 1863GiB
                        capabilities: primary

​

However I'm fairly sure the drive is actually exFAT and when I try to mount the drive as ntfs it fails while when i mount as exFAT it works:

kat@right:/var/log$ sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /media/kat/T7/
NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sda1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?
kat@right:/var/log$ sudo mount -t exfat /dev/sda1 /media/kat/T7/

[jlittle]

It looks to me like you may have hit a similar problem as I reported in this post, though in my case an NTFS drive can mount via "disks & devices". In my case dmesg indicates some kind of weird uncorrectable permissions problem.

In my case attempting to use "disks & devices" to mount some removable drives with btrfs causes the drive to go into an error state, not mounted but unmountable, on at least one hard drive the LED flashing, and a reboot is needed. So, if the initial automatic "mount & open" pop-up doesn't appear, I don't do that.

My workaround is to put entries in /etc/fstab with noauto,user options. Then, after the normal pop-up fails to appear, I can click on the drive in dolphin and it mounts. For example:

LABEL=othniel  /mnt/othniel  btrfs noatime,noauto,user 0 2
LABEL=noah     /mnt/noah     btrfs noatime,noauto,user 0 2
LABEL=saul     /mnt/saul     btrfs noatime,noauto,user 0 2
LABEL=solange  /mnt/solange  btrfs noatime,noauto,user 0 2
​