[clug] USB memory stick

Basil Chupin blchupin at tpg.com.au
Mon Apr 12 05:01:28 GMT 2004


Michael Carden wrote:
> I have just been given a USB 'keychain' style flash memory beastie. It's a 
> no-name thing with "Standard and Poor's" printed on its outside. I'd like to 
> use it on a machine running Debian unstable and kernel 2.4.22
> 
> USB in general is working on this machine; my digital camera can be mounted as 
> a USB block storage device and files may be copied from it.
> 
> When I connect the memory stick, dmesg shows that it has been seen, but it 
> throws an error:
> 
> hub.c: new USB device 00:07.2-1, assigned address xx
> usb_control/bulk_msg: timeout
> usb.c: USB device not accepting new address=xx (error=-110)
> 
> where xx is a decimal number that increments by 1 each time I reconnect the 
> stick. With the stick attached, the contents of   /proc/scsi/usb-storage-0/1 
> look like:
> 
> Host scsi1: usb-storage
>        Vendor: Unknown
>       Product: Generic USB Disk Device
> Serial Number: GENERIC USB DISK DEVICE????????
>      Protocol: 8070i
>     Transport: Bulk
>          GUID: 10d61000e9dff2ce88888888
>      Attached: No
> 
> Needless to say, I can't mount or use the stick. I have Googled and read Nico 
> Sauer's USB flash memory howto, but the answer eludes me there.
> 
> Can someone suggest a web reference I should be reading or offer any 
> suggestions for using the stick?
> 
> Thanks,
> MC

I've been using a flash disk (128Mb) with kernel 2.4.x (in Suse 9.0) for 
months, until I replaced it with a bigger cpacity one and which also has 
USB 2.0 capability - and then I couldn't get a rise out of the darn 
thing. However, I finally got it to work with kernel 2.4.x, as well as 
the 2.6.5-7 kernel with some help from someone in the UK.

Check the following after you plug it in:

* what is displayed when you use 'fdisk -l'? The flash disk should 
appear as sda and may then be split into 4 primary partitions (sda1 - 
sda4) with goobly-dook beginning/ending sectors (mine ended up having 
1.3Tb - yes Tb - of available space in the last partition (sda4) :-));

* is it formatted as a single primary partition as FAT16? You may need 
to do this using the partitioner in your Linux distro;

* if it ends up being seen correctly in fdsik (or cfdisk, which is 
better app to use) but it still won't appear on the desktop - even if 
the system beeps to indicate that it has been "recognised" - then the 
way to go is to insert an entry into fstab so that the icon appears on 
the Desktop on boot and you can easily mount it. The entry ought to look 
like this-

/dev/sda1 /<mountpoint>/sda1   auto   sync,noauto,user,exec  0 0

in my case <mountpoint> is /media so the entry here is /media/sda1 .

Cheers.


-- 
All Scottish food is based on a dare.



More information about the linux mailing list