How to fix disks not mounting in ubuntu based systems

If you see: "you are not authorized to mount this device"

You will notice this in your GUI when you attempt to mount a disk, for example, /sdd or /sda. There has been some sort of indication that something might have gone wrong and this is something that may be difficult to resolve.

 I have encountered this issue a few times. You can manually try to mount the disks using fdisk or lsblk to find the dev paths, and then mount with something like mount -t followed by the dev path of the drive you are trying to mount, but if these techniques fail, there is one sure way. The sure way to fix this issue

You need to edit this file: run the following

sudo nano /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.UDisks2.policy

There are two main things to edit and look for in the files

__________________________________________________________________________________
<!-- Mounting filesystems -->
<action id="org.freedesktop.udisks2.filesystem-mount">
<description>Mount a filesystem</description>

___________________________________________________________________________________

<!-- mount a device considered a "system device" -->
<action id="org.freedesktop.udisks2.filesystem-mount-system">
<description>Mount a filesystem on a system device</description>
_______________________________________________________________________

You'll see at the bottom of each of these:

______________________________________________________________

<defaults>
<allow_any>yes</allow_any>
<allow_inactive>yes</allow_inactive>
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>
</defaults>
_________________________________________________________
you need to make sure to change everything to "yes"