iB::Topic::usb drive problems

	Damn Small Linux :: Damn Small Linux Board The DSL Forums

» Welcome Guest
[ Log In :: Register ]

Damn Small Linux Board » Damn Small Linux » USB booting » usb drive problems

		Mini-ITX Boards Sale, Fanless BareBones Mini-ITX, Bootable 1G DSL USBs, 533MHz Fanless PC <-- SALE $200 each!
		Get The Official Damn Small Linux Book. DSL Market , Great VPS hosting provided by Tektonic

Pages: (3) </ [1] 2 3 >/

[ Track this topic :: Email this topic :: Print this topic ]

Topic: usb drive problems, Cant get booting from a 1gb flash drive.

< Next Oldest | Next Newest >

declanh

Group: Members
Posts: 7
Joined: Dec. 2005

Posted: 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

cbagger01

Group: Members
Posts: 4264
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: 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.

declanh

Group: Members
Posts: 7
Joined: Dec. 2005

Posted: 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

Anonymous Coward
Unregistered

Posted: 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!