USB flash drive won't mount - wrong fs?

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: USB flash drive won't mount - wrong fs?
started by: dslfool

Posted by dslfool on April 02 2004,06:02

Attempting to mount a friend's Kingston DataTraveler 256MB USB 1.1 flash drive in DSL 0.6.2. Don't want to boot from drive (PCs involved won't support USB boot), just want to mount and write data.

The drive has been formatted in "Unix" format in Mac OS X and since then has been reformatted in Windows 98 SE (in vfat? - I don't think there's a choice in 98?). Before and after the attempts to mount in DSL the drive works fine on a Mac w/ OS X and on two different Windows 98 SE PCs, one a 450MHz PIII and the other a 350MHz AMD.

Whether in place when DSL boots or plugged in later, /etc/fstab shows four entries "/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 auto noauto,users,exec 0 0", etc., through sda4.

If I use mount.app to try to mount any of the four sda's, I get a dialog box titled "Device not ready" and containing "Unable to mount device at this time. [snip] 1) The device isn't quite ready yet [snip] 2) The media is unreadable 3) The mount point directory is in use by another program."

From a shell if I "sudo su" and then "mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 -t vfat" (or sda2, etc.), I get the error "mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1".

If I kill fluxbox, I see on-screen: "/dev/sda1: Input/output error
mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified"

Afterwards, I can read or write to the drive in Windows 98 or Mac OS X, so the drive is functioning.

The last formatting of the drive was in Windows 98 SE - am I wrong that this would have been vfat? Anything else I'm doing wrong?

Posted by cbagger01 on April 02 2004,06:22

Try mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1

If you already have another usb or scsi device existing, then the new usb flash drive will not be located at /dev/sdax

According to the Usb Linux website:

< http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/ >

your usb flash drive is supported under Linux. You may need to reformat the device as a MSDOS or FAT16 device in order to be able to automatically mount it in both Win98 and Linux.

Good Luck.

Posted by dslfool on April 02 2004,06:51

Thanks for the reply. No dice yet, probably because I'm not doing it right. If I sudo su and then "mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1" (with or without "-t vfat"), I get an error that /mnt/sdb1 does not exist. I tried manually adding this command to /etc/fstab, but that didn't help (and if I restart I lose the fstab addition?).

Also, for what it's worth, neither PC has SCSI devices installed, nor are there any other USB devices connected. Is it normal to get sda 1 through 4 if there is only one device (the flash drive) connected and only 2 USB ports on the PC?

Posted by dslfool on April 02 2004,07:50

Ah, might have found it - I wasn't familiar with the site < http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/ > (thanks, cbagger), so I checked it out for the heck of it. The user who made the entry for the Kingston Data Traveler 256MB drive reports that this devise doesn't work with kernel 2.4.20, but works with 2.4.21. DLS 0.6.2 uses 2.4.20, yes?

Posted by dslfool on April 02 2004,08:42

Oh, wait. uname -r returns "2.4.22-xfs", so the kernel is that version? I guess the alledged 2.4.20 incompatibility ain't it. Any other ideas?

Posted by roberts on April 02 2004,17:39

How many partitions and what types does an fdisk -l /dev/sda report.?

Posted by dslfool on April 02 2004,18:54

fdisk -l /dev/sda returns nothing, blank line response, but with /dev/hda the HD partitions are listed. (Also, /etc/fstab shows the sda's if the flash drive is present at boot and the drive's read/write LED flashes during the detection phase of boot.)

Went back to Windows 98, fdisk showed no partition on the drive. Created single partition, confirmed it showing in Windows fdisk, then reformatted drive. Went back to DSL, no change - DSL fdisk for sda shows nothing.

Posted by dslfool on April 03 2004,10:24

Looks like it was the previous Windows formatting that screwed up the flash drive. I found someone with the same symptoms and his solution at < http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/164682. > I tried fdisking and mkfsing the drive using Red Hat 9, then tried the drive with DSL - it's working great! Dunno why DSL's (and Knoppix 3.2's) fdisk couldn't get to the drive, but it worked with RH.