Stops reading some drives

[altquixote]

I have been using Firefox in Ubuntu for years. Suddenly, two problems have come up.

1. It has stopped reading any drive - a partition on the hard drive, a USB stick and an SD card. The only drive it sees is the partition on which Ubuntu is installed.

2. I am unable to enter anything in certain web form fields. The cursor blinks in the field, but does not respond to the 'space' command, and keyboard inputs are not registered.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox, updated Ubuntu and run its broken packages repair function from the boot menu,but the problems have persisted.

Help will be greatly appreciated.

[makaiguy]

Have you tried running in Mozilla Safe Mode? This is a troubleshooting mode which will run with default theme and with all extensions and a few other things disabled. If the problem clears up under Safe Mode, you'll know there is a good chance the problem is with a theme or extension.

Now you can investigate which one is the problem by disabling one or more at a time and restarting the program. When the problem clears up, you'll know it is caused by one of the disabled ones, and you can refine further.

Info on Safe Mode:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_mode

[altquixote]

Thank you, makaiguy. Haven't tried it. Will do it now.

[DanRaisch]

Moving to Firefox Support as no bug has been identified here.

[altquixote]

Ok.

[altquixote]

@makaiguy, safe mode did not help.
I switched to Windows 10 (it's dual-boot), read the disks and switched back to Ubuntu. No go.
I tried a reverse approach - opened a partition in my file manager, selected an html file and tried to open it with Firefox by right-clicking. Firefox could not read the file. The error message says "... not readable. It may have been removed, moved, or file permissions may be preventing access." I checked permissions and found all permissions were enabled.

[Grumpus]

When you hit /File/Open File did you try to mount (click or double click) the particular device from the list first?

Also , which version of Ubuntu are you using?

P.S: There may also be an alternative layout which instead of a list of devices it just has +Other
Clicking that will also make the other drives and devices available.
Also, should you be in administrative mode the other devices will not load, particularly when online.