What is going on with my USB stick?
 

Hi;

I got a free 1 Gig USB stick as a promotional. I would like to install SystemRescueCD on it to make it into a "live usb stick". My computer is running Ubuntu 8.04.

I am having trouble detecting the device it is on and I think there may be partition or file system issues on the stick.

First issue: finding out what device the USB stick is:

running this command

yields with the USB stick plugged in (& autodetected) and NOT plugged in to eliminate my computer's devices yields this:

I get 2 device names, but I only have one USB ( or any ) device plugged into my computer.

Why do I get two device names?

funning modprobe with the USB plugged in and automounted by Ubuntu yields nothing

runnng dmesg seems to indicate a problem, but I don't understand the output



running fdisk -l on the first device sdb yields

running fdisk -l on the second device yields listings that are almost identical ( the same device, two partitions? ) except no file system

To figure out which is my USB I replugged the stick in and let Ubuntu auto detect and mount it. I then put a file called Hello.txt on it and then I unmounted the USB stick.

Attempting to mount the first device, sdb yields an error message

Attempting to mount the second device, sdb1 is successful and it has my text file

So, I come back to the question, why 2 device names when there is only one USB device plugged in?

Thanks much in advance for any info

kind of a long description of a problem for such a short answer.
Some usb sticks have a virtual partition where they try to emulate a floppy drive(a: or b:) where the security lock for the main partition is located and other things.
Try plugging it in to a windows computer (yea I know how that sounds) and see what happenes. If you get 2 drives, one beeing a floppy, you get your answer, if not... just format the whole thing.

Fedora Development

There is nothing wrong.
sdb is your entire drive
sdb1 is the 1st partition. This contains the filesystem i.e data which is typically FAT32.

In a nutshell partitions divide a drive into pieces. Lots of information on partitions can be found by googling. A flash drive can be divided into 15 partitions (since it is uses the SCSI subsystem) with 4 being called primary. A primary partition can be designated as an extended partition which can be subdivided into 11 logical partitions. A data (primary,logical) partition can not be subdivided which is why nothing is displayed on the output of fdisk for /dev/sdb1. You can only mount a data filesystem which in your case is just sdb1.

If you look at the entire output of cat /proc/partitions you should see multiple partitions for the internal drive.

Thanks for the answers guys.

Is there any way ( and do I want to ) to blow away the sdb1 partition?
I would like to use the whole USB stick for a liveUSB stick

As michaelk says, you have only the one partition /dev/sdb1
Use it as you wish.
If you "blow it away", you'll only have to re-create it again, one way or another.

You can use dd to completely wipe the usb stick.

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdb

Then use fdisk to re-create a primary partition on it.

Then you can use mkfs or the like to create the type of filesystem you want on it.

/dev/sdc is the device for the drive. /dev/sdc1 is the device for the partition on the device. Before the partition is the MBR. The partition probably starts at block 63. You can check this with "sudo /sbin/fdisk -lu /dev/sdc".

You can also get information on your pendrive with "udevinfo -q info -n /dev/sdc1". It will show what filesystem is on it, the label and UUID of the filesystem.

Just want to caution anyone to double check if that is really the drive they want to wipe clean. Your usb drive will not always get mounted at /dev/sdb. If you, like me, sometimes have a problem with hal or your usb card where it disconnects and reconnects drives for no apparent reason, the device name might change without you doing anything.

I guess the most secure way would be to do this by UUID (potentially more confusing) or if possible by the devices individual name, if set. I did a quick search to see if I can find anything on this, but I can't. I'm kind of curious myself if and how that might be possible.

If there is a problem with the filesystem on the drive, you could simply format the filesystem on /dev/sdb1 (assuming that is what is used).
But having /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb1 for example is normal. There is nothing wrong with that.

I tried to use a promotional usb drive at work and windows didn't even recognize it. The same thing happened when a Windows server was being installed. One of the installers had files he needed to install copied to a pen drive he got from Disney at NAB. Windows didn't see it. I had a laptop that I had dual booting with Mandrake Linux. I rebooted into Mandrake, inserted the pendrive and sent the files over the network.

If this is a pendrive that has some promotional material on it, it may have some defects intentionally in the filesystem to make it harder to delete the promotional material. Some pendrives will simulate a hard disk for part of it. (U3 and others).

You can use "udevinfo -q env -n /dev/sdb1" to determine the filesystem, label and UUID. If you wanted to add an entry in /etc/fstab for the pendrive, you would want to use "LABEL=" or "UUID=" instead of the device name in the first field of the /etc/fstab entry. Also use the "noauto" option. This will enable you to mount it (manually) even if it gets a different device assigned to it the next time you plug it in.

Trickykid: You don't want to wipe a hard drive using /dev/random. You will run out of entropy very quickly. You can use /dev/urandom oro /dev/zero instead. A pen drive is flash based so you don't need to worry about previous material being extracted as can happen to one or two layers of magnetic material.