usb drive problems

Forum: USB booting
Topic: usb drive problems
started by: declanh

Posted by declanh on Dec. 20 2005,17:20

I have installed DSL on a 1gb flash drive (zip-flash)
it has created a 50mb partition which appears to be fine
however my machine trys to boot from it and locks at the syslinux prompt

When i view the drive from windows I see two partitions
1 at 50mb and the other at 127Gb !

DSL seems to have left the drive in a state where i cannot access the other partition from windows and windows thinks its 127Gb and refuses to partition it.

As it stands im left with a 1gb usb drive with only 50mb useable

I have tried a few utils to repartition the disk - none were sucessful

1: Partition Magic - does not recongise the flash drive
2: Swissknife
3: kildisk from killdisk.com

None were able to sort it out.
Has anyone else seen this problem and know of a solution/workaround?

Ideally I want to have a boot USB DSL with embeded DSL there too and the rest of the space available for both windows and dsl

Posted by cbagger01 on Dec. 21 2005,04:13

Boot DSL from livecd.

Open a terminal window and type:

dmesg | grep scsi -A 3

Find the device name for your USB disk, it is usually "sda" or "sdb". In this example, it is "sda". So we erase the drive and then repartition it manually. You then type:

sudo su
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
cfdisk /dev/sda

and then create a new FAT or FAT16 partition #1.

Finally, format the partition with:

mkdosfs /dev/sda1
sync

And then you should have a "normal" USB drive again for MSWindows.

Posted by declanh on Dec. 21 2005,19:45

TRied all of the above ... the dd command above did not finish - despite me waiting 10+ hours - the led on the drive was on continuously

I killed the command and now the drive is not recognised by cfdisk at all

cfdisk /dev/sda gives a FATAL error
similarly the
dd command now fails with "no space on device" if it try it now ...

in windows the drive is reported as 'generic' with no size and cant be formatted or partitioned....

looks like this is a dead usb drive

Posted by Anonymous Coward on Dec. 26 2005,15:18

This is a long shot... Does the HP formatting tool (in windows) still work?

(If you are not familiar with it, it works with any brand key, as far as I can tell.)

I've also heard of people saving their drives with it in similar situations.

< http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/hpcpqdt/us/download/20306.html >

Hope that helps!

Posted by declanh on Dec. 26 2005,19:11

Quote (Guest @ Dec. 26 2005,10:18)

nope - i tried that too (thanks anyway) - along with every other tool i could find -
looks well and truly dead

Posted by Orion on Jan. 24 2006,10:08

I installed DSL to my 2GB Transcend Jetflash USB-stick (USB HDD) to . Result: UNUSABLE STICK ! AARGH!

Windows recognises it, but cannot access it. Formatting not possible, linux can't do anything about it... Abovementioned tricks just produced errors...

However: Trascend sticks have an utility CD that contains a formatting utility. It worked!

If You have a Jetflash stick don't have the CD, try getting it from
< http://www.transcendusa.com/Support/DLCenter/index.asp >

It might work on other sticks too, I don't know...

IMHO: This screw-up is a DSL-problem, not a stick problem!

Posted by cbagger01 on Jan. 24 2006,17:52

The FAT filesystem is limited to data partitions that are 2.1GB in size. Maybe your USB Stick exceeds this limit?

Now that you have reformatted your partition, can you check the Properties in MSWindows and see if it is formatted FAT or FAT32?

Maybe a disclaimer should be added to the USBHDD install script that says that large devices (>2GB) will not work.

Posted by Orion on Jan. 25 2006,16:20

Media: 1,95 GB FAT

Shouldn't be a problem.

Posted by cbagger01 on Jan. 25 2006,18:30

Then I'm stumped.

Do you need special drivers to make it work from within Windows?

Posted by Orion on Jan. 26 2006,12:26

No,

It works fine from QEMU.

Posted by zigi iz maribora on Jan. 28 2006,09:32

http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/f...load/20306.html

This is all you need.

Posted by zigi iz maribora on Jan. 28 2006,09:39

http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/hpcpqdt/us/download/20306.html

Sorry for my mistake.

Posted by ChiuCS on Feb. 10 2006,05:12

try (on linux)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
to kill all partition information
and
echo -e "n\np\n1\n\n\nt\n6\nw" | fdisk /dev/sda >/dev/null 2>&1
to re-partition it.

Posted by z000m on Feb. 16 2006,15:46

i had the same problem as the first guy, only had 50mb of space on 512mb lexar jumpdrive after trying to make bootable usb dsl, but the HP usb disk storage tool worked fine here and restored the drive.
was very relieved :P