Quote Originally Posted by rickenbacherus
What makes you say the partition table is bogus? Is it not actually there?

I have no trouble accessing USB disks no matter how many partitions they have. I don't use desktop icons myself so I'm not much help there.
There are no partitions, just a single FAT FS. The kernel however reports 4 partitions

May 16 09:25:07 macau kernel: SCSI device sda: 128000 512-byte hdwr sectors (66 MB)
May 16 09:25:07 macau kernel: sda: Write Protect is off
May 16 09:25:07 macau kernel: sda: sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4

/proc/partitions shows

major minor #blocks name rio rmerge rsect ruse wio wmerge wsect wuse running use aveq

8 0 64000 sda 122895 45 245880 874940 1025 121855 245760 2596960 0 973410 3471900
8 1 2023554176 sda1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
8 2 1408628884 sda2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
8 3 5 sda3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
8 4 490806906 sda4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Look at the block counts, I call those bogus.

It isn't just a single device, I have three completely different ones that exhibit the same behaviour.

I guess it's really a kernel issue, it shouldn't consider those partitions as valid.