USB booting :: usb drive not fully recognised

<background story>
I just got a new 128mb drive and I'm trying to put DSL on it.

My first attempt was in win xp, I copied the files from another usb drive, and ran syslinux.exe on the new one. That booted but stopped with some kernel panic about the file system.

My second attempt was with a DSL 1.5 CD. I had a bit of an accident when the live cd loaded a backup file from the usb drive I forgot to take out. As a result most of fluxbox was mis-configured and I ended up fiddling with the install script through a terminal. I consider that all in the past as I have since reformatted my new usb drive with FAT in win xp and moved a test file onto it.
</background story>

The live cd won't recognise the usb drive properly. The usb install script fails and I can't access it with cfdisk (I was root the whole time). Here are some messages from dmesg:

Unplug usb flash drive:

Quote

usb.c: USB disconnect on device 00:13.0-3 address 7

Plug it in:

Quote

hub.c: new USB device 00:13.0-3, assigned address 8
usb.c: USB device 8 (vend/prod 0xd7d/0x1400) is not claimed by any active driver.
scsi singledevice 2 0 0 1
scsi singledevice 2 0 0 2
scsi singledevice 2 0 0 3
scsi singledevice 2 0 0 4
scsi singledevice 2 0 0 5
scsi singledevice 2 0 0 6
FAT: Did not find valid FSINFO signature.
Found signature1 0x4e0005 signature2 0xc00b6600 sector=1.
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev 03:01.
FAT: Did not find valid FSINFO signature.
Found signature1 0x4e0005 signature2 0xc00b6600 sector=1.
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev 03:01.
FAT: Did not find valid FSINFO signature.
Found signature1 0x4e0005 signature2 0xd6e80000 sector=1.
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev 03:05.
FAT: Did not find valid FSINFO signature.
Found signature1 0x4e0005 signature2 0xd6e80000 sector=1.
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev 03:05.

Here's the output from the install script:

Quote

Last change to exit before destroying all data on /dev/sda
Continue (y/..)? y

Writing zero's to beginning of /dev/sda Done.
Partitioning /dev/sda
/dev/sda: No such device or address
Formatting /dev/sda1
dd: /dev/sda: No such device or address
Applying syslinux to pendrive partition.
/dev/sda1: No such device or address
Setting up system image on /mnt/sda1...mkdir: Cannot create directory `/mnt/pendrive': File exists
mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device
Error mounting usb device

Ah check that it is mounted at sda. On my system there is nothing else that would indicate that it would be on sdb but it was. When you run the install script have it output the info on your drive. There should be some bluegreen text that will say where it is mounted.

The /mnt/pendrive makes me think you may have already had the system mounted.

Check /dev/sdb and see if it is not mounted

In the end I got the DSL 2.3 iso, used it with the Live CD vm for vmplayer (http://www.vmwarez.com/2006/02/livecd-player-virtual-machine.html). I suspect if I just rebooted it would have worked too.

original here.