USB pendrive not seen

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: USB pendrive not seen
started by: JohnS

Posted by JohnS on Dec. 24 2004,21:58

In order to try backup and restore I went out and bought a 128 meg usb stick (inteligent stick 2) but DSL does not see it, I tried it on two different machines an got the same result. It won't mount on sda1 (or anything else for that matter). I tried an fdisk on /dev/sda sdb sdc etc and it alsways says it cannot open the device. The /proc/bus/usb/devices shows it being there, the /proc/scsi/scsi also has it. The begining of dmesg says its there as sda: sda1, sda2, sda3, sda4. There are some error messages in dmesg, I've spent the last 2 days tracking these down on the web and most places just give different fstab entries to try, non of this made any diffeence.

I finally found one message that had exactly the same symptoms as mine ans they fixed it by recompiling the kernel with a certain scsi option. Somone else suggested that wasn't really necessary, just put an option in the modules.conf file, here is the link to that message:
< http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Fedora/2004-04/2815.html >

I tried doing this edit then plugging in the stick, but it didn't change anything, probably because the scsi system had already started so it wouldn't read the the option. I tried doing a noscsi, nousb at boot, but it started the scsi system to read the cdrom anyway and since scsi wasn't turned on it didn't start hotplug so plugging in the stick after making the change didn't do anything.

So the question is: how do I try this change to modules.conf on a live cd? Do I have to remester the system with the changed file or is there some other way to do it? With the .dsl files I can put them on second session on the CD, can I do this with the modules.conf file?

I haven't tried remastering yet but I suppose I could try that this afternoon and se if I'm succesful at it.

I know a lot of people just say "get a different stick" but it DOES work under XP on the same harware, so it has to be a software issue somewhere and I would like to try and track that down.

Thanks for any help anyone can provide.

John S.