Recover of pen drive
 

Hi,

I have a problem with a pen drive on which I stored some useful files.

The pen drive was formatted as ext3 and it operated properly until I, after mounted on a different Linux box, tried to copy into it a long file.
This action was not well performed and the copy process interrupted for space reason.
The problem is that the pen drive became almost invisible to my laptop (and to other boxes).
When I insert the pen into the USB interface and give the command
mount /mnt/pen
I obtain the response
mount: only root can do this
which is different from the normal behavior, and I became root and hit the same command, I obtain
mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist

I have to point out that the device path exists, the pen drive exists, and it is physically attached. Moreover this command operates correctly with other pen drives.

The relevant line in the file /etc/fstab is:
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/pen auto auto,user,rw 0 0

I also gave the command dmesg and the relevant part is:
usb 2-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
scsi6 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 6
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=0dd8, idProduct=1400
usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 2-2: Product: Flash Drive
usb 2-2: Manufacturer: USB
usb 2-2: SerialNumber: 0909042158282
scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access USB Flash Drive 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 3909383 512-byte hardware sectors (2002 MB)
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 14 00 0d d8
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 3909383 512-byte hardware sectors (2002 MB)
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 14 00 0d d8
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sdb: unknown partition table
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
usb-storage: device scan complete

I think that the problem it is that shown in the line
sdb: unknown partition table

I don't know how to recover the pen drive and all advices are welcomed.

aloisius-a

Are you able to see the pendrive partitions using "fdisk -l"?
Have you tried mounting on any other Operating systems?

You should try to repair the partition table.
If you make the exact partition table...then you will not lose your data.
Probably you only had 1 partition so it should be easy to repartition with exact partition sizes.