All of my last three USB sticks have been the Kingston DataTraveler, and I'm satisfied with them, but I think as I buy more USB sticks over time, I should avoid buying the same brand and model, especially for sticks I run Linux off of. I discovered my BIOS doesn't distinguish between two of them (they're both listed as "Kingston DataT", while the third is a slight variant that it identifies as "Kingston DT101"), so when I check the boot order to make sure it will look first for the stick I put my operating system on, I can't tell which "DataT" is which. The only way to be sure is to unplug the two other sticks and plug them back in later.

Anyway, I could sidestep this little problem by buying different brands and models of sticks or at least buying a different brand for the stick I now keep my OS on; so I guess my next stick won't be a Kingston DataTraveler.

Or label them? And since there is no question here (maybe you forgot to ask?) such a message may be better off in your personal LQ web log.

Hi there,

I don't quite understand what you're going to tell us or what you're pondering about. Do you have trouble finding the right USB drive in your pocket? Haven't you thought yet of marking them? Say, with a durable pen, or by engraving? I. too, have a few identical USB pen drives, but I just marked them with numbers on their case, so I can easily distinguish them.
Once they're plugged in, I don't need to see that mark anyway, because during formatting I gave them different volume labels.

[X] Doc CPU

Marking the drives is a good idea -- volume labelling does not work as it's not seem by the BIOS which just reports the manufacturer name, at least in my experience.

Hi there,

oh, it does work - but only in the OS's file manager after it's booted. I thought that was the point, sorry.
You're right, of course, that this is not recognized at BIOS level before booting.

[X] Doc CPU

[sigh] Looking up, I see "This Linux forum is for general Linux questions and discussion" [emphasis mine]. And I supposed it might be understood that by posting this in the first place, I was effectively asking anyone whether they agreed with my idea, even if I didn't bother saying "Is this a sound idea?" I don't think I have enough knowledge (or popularity) to justify keeping a blog (I tried it once), and if I did, my experience on LQ suggests that if I said whatever was on my mind (the point of a blog), I'd have to disallow comments unless I wanted to tolerate a lot of unnecessary snarky remarks.

As for the suggestions that I physically mark or label my sticks, this isn't about the need to physically identify them--they do look different. (Kingston color-codes different memory sizes in the DataTraveler series and my third stick is an older DT model made of aluminum.) The problem I discovered was that my BIOS editor doesn't distinguish between certain ones (if only because it truncates the names to "Kingston DataT"), and I was thinking I could avoid this by not buying the same sticks.

Blogging serves a different purpose. There is also a difference between a personal blog and a technical blog. So you could always start a personal blog over at a dedicated blogging site.

As for using a different brand of usb stick for your OS, that's possibly a wise choice. It's irritating that the bios doesn't read labels but that's just the way it is. :sigh:

Hi there,

then I'm back to where I don't understand your concern. If you can identify these sticks by their looks (color or something), you know exactly which one to plug in to boot from. So it's irrelevant if the BIOS boot menu lists that one by name or just a cryptic code. You just select the USB device and there you go.
What am I missing?

But again: What for? You know that the black one (just for example) is 8GB and has Kubuntu on it, the silver one is 4GB and has Debian on it, and the bronze one is 16GB and has six different ISOs and a syslinux menu allowing you to select one. So you pick the desired one by its color, plug it in, and boot. There's no need to identify it again at BIOS level, is there?

[X] Doc CPU

add udev rules for the thumb drives
there are a ton of attributes that can be used to identify a drive

The Arch wiki is a good source of info for any distro you are using
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php..._a_normal_user

or
label the partitions on them

if it is just a storage thumb drive
one partition is fine
label it and us the uuid in fstab as the identifier for mounting

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The OP probably leaves his many usb devices plugged in between reboots. Hence the problem. The bios displays two or three identically named usb devices. He doesn't know which one is the bootable one and which one is the data one. The bios lists all usb drives regardless of whether or not they are even bootable.

Hi there,

whoah! That could be an explanation. But why would he do that??
I hadn't thought of that because I never leave them plugged in longer than absolutely necessary

Yea, that's because bootability can't be detected from simple properties. Booting simply means loading sector 0 into memory, assuming it is executable code, and execute it. Thus, from the BIOS's point of view, any media is bootable.

[X] Doc CPU

Exactly, yes. I usually leave them plugged in.

We do have different habits. Why wouldn't I want to leave my sticks in all the time?--it's not dangerous. I don't always leave my backup USB stick in, but I normally always leave the stick inserted that contains all my personal files (I don't keep them in my user account).

I guess you treat your sticks as people used to treat floppy disks, inserting them only whenever you want to access them; I treat them like small hard drives. Not because I think it's better to, but mostly because I haven't used floppy disks in about ten years, started using USB sticks only last year, and am used to using only an ever-present hard drive every day. (Until recently, when I learned how to put a Linux OS on a stick. My hard drive happened to be failing just then, so I let it die, and now use only sticks.)

Hi there,

speaking of habits - yes, it's a habit of mine.

You guessed right, I treat them more or less as floppy replacements. Very large floppies at that.
But that's not the reason for my unplugging them soon after use (I also used to leave floppy disks in the drive for days, though with the heads lifted off). The real reason is that I often had (and still have) to do with computers where USB ports are limited and thus precious resources. Some of the computers I occasionally work with have only four or even only two USB ports. You'll understand that under these conditions I don't want to "waste" ports when I don't need the device plugged in.
And yes, that habit still kicks in, even if a PC has 8 or ten USB ports available.

Plus, I still don't trust those USB flash memories in terms of reliability. I already had to discard two of them after a few years because of an alarming increase of errors - countless files being saved were corrupted.

[X] Doc CPU

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I don't trust hard drives any more than that because of the terrible luck I've had; and using CDs is also problematic, because they're easy to scratch.

asking for trouble here but

in the last 13 years i have had ZERO drives go bad and fail
I do have a 12 year old drive with more than a few bad sectors , but it is 12 years old .

my brother-in-law has had 2 go bad in that time
One of them i had him put in the freezer so he could access it for the last time

personally i would NOT leave a thumb drive in all the time
Now a 3 or 4 TB usb drive yes but thumb drives are "portable" and basically the "new" floppy/cd/dvd

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