Pen Drives not being recognized
 

Hi, it's really wierd, ih ave this 256 meg Pen Drive that i heard will jsut show up as an icon on your desktop when you put it into the USB.. for some reason i'm not getting it.. do i have to mount it or something?

a pen drive are those external small usb hard drives..

You probably do need to mount it. I would try (unless you have a SCSI drive being /dev/sda, in which case you may need to use /dev/sdb or something) "mkdir /mnt/flashdrive; mount /dev/sda1 /flashdrive".

If you have trouble knowing what device it is, you may want to look at the output of "cat /proc/scsi/scsi" and try to find it there.

I don't know why USB flash drives pretend to be SCSI devices, but every one that I've seen has.

If you still don't have it working, you may need to partition it with fdisk <device name>.

Finally, if you want it to start showing up on your desktop automatically, add a line for it to /etc/fstab that automounts it as necessary.

ok i made the directory and i typed mount /dev/sda1 /flashdrive but it says i need to decide what file system it is

i tried to get the output of cat /proc/.... but it won't let me see anything :S

linux:/home/mark # mount /dev/sda1 /flashdrive; mount /dev/sda1/flashdrive
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
mount: can't find /dev/sda1/flashdrive in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab
linux:/home/mark #


This is the exact error i get =\

ok, i got it to work and now i get this
linux:/home/mark # cat /proc/scsi/scsi
Attached devices:
Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: USB Model: Flash Drive Rev: 1.12
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
linux:/home/mark #

anyone?

You want to mount /dev/sda1 not /dev/sda1/flashdrive

/dev/sda1 is the partition that you're trying to mount from the sda device (In this case, your flash drive)
Try editing /etc/fstab with the following line:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/flashdrive vfat noauto,user,rw 0 0

be sure to "chgrp users /mnt/flashdrive" and chmod it 775, so users can read from and write to it.

If you view /dev/sda with fdisk or cfdisk (don't edit the partition table if you already have data on the drive), how many partitions are on your flash drive and what type are they?

When I got mine, I had three or four partitions of random types on there. I deleted them, and created one Windows partition (hey, I'm going back and forth between school and home, gimme a break! :-P), formatted it, and it worked. (Oddly enough, it worked with a Windows box even before I did that...)

Try this command as root:
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /flashdrive

hmm it was wierd, i got it working before and it would popup saying it detected it, but would enver show a new icon...

when i type that in i get this

linux:/home/mark # mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /flashdrive
mount: mount point /flashdrive does not exist

whats even wierd about this is, it was recognizing it, but it won't now.. but it is still shown in suseplugger hardware manager... it's /sda

ok, i seem to have gotten it ,but now it displays two flash drives icons when it's really one...
anyone know how to fix that?

nevermind, i got it thanks :)