lost settings for usb camera (memory stick) Slack 10

tireseas · 12-03-2004, 07:18 AM

Hi all

After rebooting my Slack 10 (vanilla kernel) box I tried to load my USB camera which is symlinked /dev/sda1 to /mnt/digicam and all set up in /etc/fstab and has always worked fine. This time post-reboot, I am informed that /dev/sda1 is *not* a valid block device. I've checked on dmesg and this is the relevant output from there:

Code:

sda: Unit Not Ready, sense:
Info fld=0xa00 (nonstd), Current 00:00: sns = 70  2
Raw sense data:0x70 0x00 0x02 0x00 0x00 0x0a 0x00 0x00
sda : READ CAPACITY failed.
sda : status = 1, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
Info fld=0xa00 (nonstd), Current sd00:00: sns = 70  2
Raw sense data:0x70 0x00 0x02 0x00 0x00 0x0a 0x00 0x00
sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
sda: test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
 sda: I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
 I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0

My question is this: how can I load this once the machine has already booted and why would this have happened on this reboot but not on any other. As far as I can recall, I did have the camera (works off of a memory stick) switched on so that it could load the memory stick as a storage device on boot.

Thanks

otoomet · 12-03-2004, 08:13 AM

The messages appear similar to what happens if an USB stick isn't formatted. Have you checked that the memory card is OK, and eventually reformatted it?

Best,

Ott

tireseas · 12-03-2004, 11:42 AM

Hey Ott

Cheers for the reply. In answer - I cannot think why the mem stick would need reformatting. It was working approx 2 weeks ago in the way I would've expected and now, after I rebooted my machine today it wouldn't.

Upon further digging around however, it does provide an msg that the file system type could not be identified and that nothing from /proc/filesystems worked. The options under /proc/filesystems are as follows:

Code:

nodev   rootfs
nodev   bdev
nodev   proc
nodev   sockfs
nodev   tmpfs
nodev   shm
nodev   pipefs
        ext3
        ext2
nodev   ramfs
        umsdos
        msdos
        vfat
        iso9660
nodev   nfs
        reiserfs
nodev   devpts
nodev   usbdevfs
nodev   usbfs

From this I would hazard a guess that there are 7 fs types it has modules loaded for - reiserfs (my fs), iso9660 (CD-R/W), vfat, msdos, unsdos (all Win related), and ext2 & ext3 (other fs options for Linux). The most obvious option would be is usbfs.
The /etc/fstab reads auto for the fs flag.

The two questions are still the same though:
1. How to fix, or am I looking to compile the usbfs into my kernel?
2. WTF happened in the first place when I rebooted?

Here's some context:

I loaded 2 x 512MB Matrix PC133 SDRAM chips into an ASRock K7VT2 running with an AMD Athlon XP2400 chip. Sometimes the boot up process gets stuck on the NVRAM check or before Lilo kicks in since I rebooted it. However, it is hard to say precisely if the "invalid block device" stderr is a result of the new chips or something else, because before I changed the chips the box was running for about 3 straight months. It is feasible something could have happened during that time and is not associated with the chips at all. I do know that the camera loaded just fine in a short space of time prior to rebooting. Maybe I have some kind of corruption booting, but as far as I can tell with rootkit and clamav there doesn't seem to be any boot sector corruption, and all other file systems appear to boot quite nicely.

In all other ways my Slack 10 box is working just as smoothly and easily as always ... except for this glitch.

TIA