Comes with a proprietary filesystem that you have to format with FAT to get to work. Once formatted, the Micro-drive is recognized by the USB hotpug module and placed under /dev/sdaX (where X is a number depending on the number of scsi devices). Then just mount the drive nomally. On one system (a Gateway 3200 running FC1) it was un-useable and gave a stream of I/O errors on insertion of the USB drive. Might have been a hardware issue. Works with Mac OSX but not OS8.

Conclusion: Handy tool to have, should work on most systems. Doesn't work "out-of-the-box", but can be made to work with a minimal amount of effort in most situations.

This Microvault USB2 256 Mb is formated in 4 parts; only 249 Mb are usable (FAT) . DiskDrake does n't like it (overlapping sectors messages). Sometimes, kudzu recognizes 4 partitions /sda1 to /sda4, with weird huge sizes, but which one is the good one ?
Finally, I added this line to the /etc/fstab : /dev/sda /mnt/sony vfat user,rw,noauto,umask=0 0 0
And it works.
But no way to use it as a valid key for MandrakeMove.

If it was possible to reformat the whole flash drive! I tried with a generic utility from Prolific Technology, but it did'nt recognize the MicroVault.

And Sony gives no tool for doing that.

Conclusion : with Linux, never buy a sophisticated pen-drive, buy a generic, standard one, it's OK.

No problems for me with my Sony MicroVault (64mb).
my current /etc/fstab entry for it

/dev/sda /mnt/usb vfat auto,user,owner,ro 0 0

Works great when adding the appropriate entry in /etc/fstab (as indicated above). My only beef is that it can't be done on the fly. In other words, unless I have the drive in my usb port on boot up, it won't work - I have to run a 'mount' command.

I would like to know how to setup a shortcut on my kDE desktop to run such a command for mounting and unmounting the drive. Does anyone know how to do that? I haven't searched these forums yet, but I searched the two Linux books I have and couldn't find out how to do so. I have an inkling it has something do with with scripts.

Fantasic workability, was able to format it into multiple filesystems such as reiserfs, ext3, and ext2. Supported multiple partitions and is an all around great product.

My only bitch is that it began to fall apart and I had to superglue it back together.