USB Not Recognised

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: USB Not Recognised
started by: kshandr

Posted by kshandr on Aug. 29 2005,11:46

Hey all,

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here - I've burned the installation image to CD and booted up off of it. My objective is to put the distribution onto a USB Flash Drive and boot off of that. So I'm running "dslinstall" and selecting the USB HDD option.

Here's the problem - When the script tries to mount the Flash Drive (/dev/sda1), it returns "/dev/sda1 is not a valid block device". When I try and mount it myself I get the same error. I can see the drive properly under windows (it has a single FAT partition right now) and I've been experimenting with FlashLinux on the same drive before now, so I know it works.

I'm wondering if maybe I don't have some module I need to access the Flash Drive. I'd be grateful for any help anyone can give me.

Edit - I've got Red Hat Enterprise on the same box, so I booted into that to see if the Flash Drive works there. It does. So there's definitely something in DSL that's not picking it up.

Posted by adssse on Aug. 29 2005,14:10

In my experiences I have found that sometimes the first time it is recognized as sda. When you first boot up run in a shell 'cat /etc/fstab' and take note of the drives. Then plug in your flash drive and wait about 20 seconds for it to recognize it and run 'cat /etc/fstab' again and take note of the difference, this should be your usb drive. If it says sda instead of sda1, I have found that I needed to unplug the drive, wait and than plug it in again wait about 20 seconds for it to recognize and 'cat /etc/fstab' and than I usually see that it is recognized as sda1 and I can use it normally.

Hope this helps.

Posted by kshandr on Aug. 29 2005,14:20

Thanks for getting back to me!

The problem is that there's no difference in /etc/fstab regardless. If I look at the fstab (with the Flash Drive in), remove the drive and look at it again, then replace the drive, there's no difference to the fstab at all.

If I manually add the relevant line to the fstab ("/dev/sda /mnt/usb vfat noauto,users,exec 0 0"), then try to mount the drive ("mount /mnt/usb") I get the "/dev/sda is not a valid block device" error again...