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USB flash drive -- buggy


shaner
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Hey Everyone,

 

I'm running LE2005 on a Laptop. I have a "GeekSquad" 256 usb flash drive from Best Buy. I use this to transfer files between comptuers and OS. It works fine in Windows, and has worked great in Mandriva till now.

Lately when I plug it in, it seems to recognize it fine. I can read from it fine. When I try to write to it it goes buggy. It seems to lock up on me, and become unaccessable. There are no error messages, other than the drive is not accessable. When I edit my /ect/fstab it always puts a lot of spaces in there between /dev/sda/ /GEEKSQUAD ....... (I'm not in linux, and don't remember the actual wording, but is similar to this) If I edit it and take out all the spaces, it seems to work fine, until I try to write to it. I have written to it before and it has worked well in the past. Question 1 What is the proper fstab line that I should have? Question 2 How can I make what I put in there stay and not change? Thanks!

 

Shane

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LE2005 uses HAL to autodetect usb storage devices and autogenerates and removes fstab entries for the devices as they connected and disconnected. You should see a "pamconsole" option in the fstab line for the device if it was autogenerated. I don't think it's your fstab entry if you are using HAL since it generates the same entry every time. Post your fstab with the device connected anyway. Also, open a console and run as root:

 

# fdisk -l

 

That will list all the partitions and will tell you if something is wrong with the "partition" on the pen drive.

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Ok, here is the fstab:

 

 
# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
/dev/hda6 / ext2 noatime 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-1,ro 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

/dev/sda1 /mnt/GEEKSQUAD vfats defaults 0 0

I added the last line. I know that I seen it somewhere. Now it doesn't even see my pen drive.

 

and here is the fdisk -l

 

 
Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        3825    30724281    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            3826        4864     8345767+   5  Extended
/dev/hda5            3826        3890      522081   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda6            3891        4864     7823623+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/sda: 256 MB, 256900608 bytes
16 heads, 32 sectors/track, 979 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 512 * 512 = 262144 bytes

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1         979      250574+   b  W95 FAT32
[root@mandrake shane]# ICE default IO error handler doing an exit(), pid = 29277, errno = 0

 

I don't think the pen drive partitioning is bad as I use it with windows as well. Thanks for the help.

 

Shane

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Ok, here is the fstab:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/GEEKSQUAD vfats defaults 0 0

I added the last line.  I know that I seen it somewhere.  Now it doesn't even see my pen drive.

First: In your fstab entry, vfats is not a valid file system type - it's vfat.

 

Second: Note that there is a recent update for the haldaemon. Apply it if you haven't already done so. For info about the update, see: http://www.mandriva.com/security/advisorie...e=MDKA-2005:036

 

For now, I would take out that fstab entry and see if it's auto-mounted by the system after the update is in place. For example, here is the auto-generated fstab entry I get when I plug in a usb flash device:

 

/dev/sdc /mnt/removable vfat pamconsole,exec,noauto,noatime,sync,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1,managed 0 0

 

Also, from a terminal, enter the dmesg command after plugging in the usb drive and see what messages you get. Here's what I get:

 

usb 5-6: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3

Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...

scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices

usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage

USB Mass Storage support registered.

usb-storage: device found at 3

usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning

Vendor: Model: USB DISK 20X Rev: 1.00

Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00

SCSI device sdc: 253952 512-byte hdwr sectors (130 MB)

sdc: Write Protect is off

sdc: Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00

sdc: assuming drive cache: write through

SCSI device sdc: 253952 512-byte hdwr sectors (130 MB)

sdc: Write Protect is off

sdc: Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00

sdc: assuming drive cache: write through

/dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0: unable to read partition table

Attached scsi removable disk sdc at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0

usb-storage: device scan complete

 

If it doesn't work, post your fstab entry and dmesg output and someone should be able to help you diagnose the problem.

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