troubleshooting flash disk that is not writable

[ianalis]

Hi!

 

I've been tinkering with my distro lately and now my flash drive is not writable anymore. First of all, I'm not asking anyone to fix it for me because it's my fault anyway. I just hope some of you can point me in the right direction.

 

Now, the flash drive is automatically mounted and unmounted. Files can also be read and copied from it. The only problem is that I can't write to it, most of times, even as root. The fstab entry for that drive is:

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/removable auto umask=0,kudzu,codepage=850,nosuid,nodev,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,users 0 0

 

I was wondering if it's a permission issue but I guess umask=0 is already sufficient. I'm thinking about replacing auto with vfat but I don't know how to do it aside from editing fstab directly. I'm not even sure if that will work. I'm planning to study how the automounting and unmounting works but I don't know where to start.

 

What do you think? Any help would be very much appreciated :)

[DragonMage]

Check your flash disk in another computer (Windows based preferably) and see whether the same problem occur. It maybe hardware (flash disk) failure. I just have that particular problem with my 3 month old Apacer 256 MB Handy Steno. The Flash RAM basically cannot be written anymore, making it effectively a read-only drive. Even formatting it is impossible.

[ianalis]

The disk is not broken. In fact, I'm able to write to it sometimes. It also works perfectly for mdk 10.0, fc3, win xp, win 2k and win 98. In fact, I am forced sometimes to reboot to winxp just to write to it.

 

Any other ideas? How do automounting and autounmounting work?

Edited March 24, 2005 by ianalis