I have an LG Nexus 5 running Android 6.0.1 which I am using as an MP3 player and for casual browsing as it has been replaced by a more modern phone. The phone is rooted and adb debugging is enabled.
For the last few months I have some weird behaviour. When I connect the phone to a computer and enable File Transfers, the phone is automatically mounted as an external drive by the OS as it has always done. When I expand "Internal Storage" I can see all the directories and files stored at the root level. When I open any of the folders they show as being empty. In order to copy files to or from the device, I have to copy them to the root directory and then move them manually using a file manager from the phone itself.
I get this behaviour from Linux and Windows machines including if adb debugging is disabled. On Linux (Ubuntu Mate 20.04.03) I also get the message No such interface org.gtk.vfs.Mount on object at path /org/gtk/vfs/mount/1 Please select another viewer and try again when I plug the phone in. Googling this only yielded forum threads that are over 5 years old (although the phone is that sort of age)
In the terminal, the device is visible when adb is queried from the terminal. If I cd to the media folder, the device isn't visible, even though I believe it is mounted already. It doesn't show up if I run sudo fdisk -l. In fact I get a strange output from that:
Device
Boot
Start
End
Sectors
Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 *
2048
1050623
1048576
512M b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2
1052670 1250263039 1249210370 595.7G 5 Extended
/dev/sda5
1052672 1250263039 1249210368 595.7G 83 Linux
Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.
Any clues as to how to fix this would be appreciated