USB storage devices problems.

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: USB storage devices problems.
started by: Zucca

Posted by Zucca on Sep. 20 2006,06:57

I have a HD in an external box that is connected via USB to my laptop.
That HD has 120GB of size and is formatted to FAT32. So only one partition.
Ok. When I power it on it takes like hmmm... eternity(?) (no really about 10 to 15 min) to regonize it. Then I can see four new diretories in /mnt.
Come again? Yes. Four.
I try to mount each of those with emelfm (as root). But nothing happens. It says that I must specify filesystem type. And oh... BTW. this action also took a lot of time, about half of eternity. ;P Anyway anyway.
I had some same kind of problems with my Crative MuVo slim (using old DSL). Expect that only one directory appeared on /mnt after pulgging. I got it to work by plugging it berofe power-on.

Hmmm. I just got an idea. I'll check that HD with cfdisk:

Quote

FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 0: Partition ends before sector 0
Press any key to exit cfdisk

Ok... Any Ideas how to fix this? =D With xubuntu that same HD works just fine... Maybe I should run fsck in xubuntu...

And finally:
I bet some of you (HERETICS! ;D) use Windows as does many of my friends... Now I'd like to format that HD to a format other than FAT or ntfs (ntfs does not have any good drivers for Linux. And does it even support owner-group-others file permissions?). Is there any such format that is accessible with Linux and Windows? Now I can't see any other solution but to format it to two partitions: first a small FAT32 partition where are the drivers for Windows to regonize ext2/ext3/reiserfs and second partition to ext2/ext3/reiserfs.

I'll check back when I have ran fsck to that HD.
Any help is still welcome.

Posted by Zucca on Sep. 20 2006,07:24

Well I ran fsck -a /dev/sda (I confirmed that it was really /dev/sda not /dev/sda1):

Oh dear... At least 1000 errors like these:

Quote

Reserved field in VFAT long filename slot is not 0 (but 0x4e).
Auto-setting to 0.
Reserved field in VFAT long filename slot is not 0 (but 0x09).
Auto-setting to 0.
Reserved field in VFAT long filename slot is not 0 (but 0xa8).
Auto-setting to 0.
Reserved field in VFAT long filename slot is not 0 (but 0x53).
Auto-setting to 0.
Reserved field in VFAT long filename slot is not 0 (but 0xac).
Auto-setting to 0.
Reserved field in VFAT long filename slot is not 0 (but 0x05).
Auto-setting to 0.
Reserved field in VFAT long filename slot is not 0 (but 0xfe).
Auto-setting to 0.
Reserved field in VFAT long filename slot is not 0 (but 0x48).
Auto-setting to 0.
Reserved field in VFAT long filename slot is not 0 (but 0x44).
Auto-setting to 0.
Reserved field in VFAT long filename slot is not 0 (but 0x30).

Also boot sector had an error. Backup and original were different... What ever that means I copied original to backups.