My local RS supplier used to distribute catalog cds - now it's usb sticks.
In a windoze box, it shows 2 drives, one empty, one with the catalog. In linux, (kernel-3.0.4) it shows one fat16 partition only - the empty one :-/. It's not junk - it's new! Testdisk only finds 1.4G whereas windoze finds over 2 gigs :-/. And the program did complain mightily.
I wanted to run this under wine. Ideas, anyone? How much of that stuff matters?

My first guess is that this is a U3 type flash drive which is why it shows up as 2 in windows but one in linux. The catalog is on the CDROM half. Have you looked at the output of dmesg?

On the U3 type flash drive - you're probably right :-(.
On the dmesg output, the critical bit was Only one partition seems to exist. I even ran fdisk, cfdisk, and testdisk and they all only found one.

If I simply copied the stuff on the cdrom partition to the normal partition, I'd be good to blow up in wine. My son has his eye on that drive, though. I'd better warn him.

A quick Google search for the words "u3" and "linux" brings up an uninstaller from U3 and a tool on sourceforge.net (alpha, but with favorable reviews).

One of the partitions will probably show up as a cd drive, my cruiser does.

I have a feeling that HAL is configured to ignore that partition. Have a look in this file:

You may need to comment out one or more of the 'info.ignore' lines for your device.

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@tonyfreeman: That's a piece of genius. I don't speak, think, or even write xml

On the disk drive, thanks very much. We can kill this here. Events have taken a hand. After being inserted into a windows box, the drive doesn't show at all! Windows(XP) has obviously "FIXED" it in passing. In windows, it came up as one drive, then came up as 2. As it never gets assigned a device, or acknowledged in lsusb, my options are limited. I'll throw it into a windows box and grab the data if I can. Then the U3 removal tool beckons.

I can always bring it back and say it doesn't work - even in windows.

Got that Hal file out of the way. What a weird idea - not to show people what's going on.

Whatever my son's copy of windoze did, the drive is invisible to USB now. In it's service, I even threw in a partition with a working(!) version of m$windoze into an Athlon box I have and tried it. It doesn't exist. It's going back, and windoze is coming out as soon as possible..

I don't know what's going on with your sandisk/cruzer but I didn't have to remove U3 from mine & I'm able to use mine with unetbootin as boot device.

NOTHING is going on with that usb drive - so it's going back, and I'll play dumb. When the system says nothing, I know exactly what to do with usb drives.
As for adding it as a boot device, that is an unusual but possibly useful idea. Did you write that up anywhere?

USB drive #2 in my posession. I loaded it in XP, saw 2 drives, copied it to an external drive, went to unmount the external drive, at which point we had an argument ("You can't do that - piss off!" to which I replied: "Can't I? Just watch me" and switched off the power to the external drive). It apparently wanted to delete the copy I had just made!

So I have a running version of the catalogue in windows. At first glance the catalogue, btw, wasn't worth the effort. Then I tried the disk in Linux, and only got a single partition. This is true even with /usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/10osvendor/20-broken-usb-sticks.fdi at zero length.

I'll try any other tricks offered in the next 24 hours to get it reading in linux, then remove the whole lot go forward from there. I have an objection to software that wants to delete stuff. It would help, I suppose in windoze world, where a thing like that usb stick would quickly pick up nasty viruses.

EDIT - P.S. There's no future in rewriting the existing stuff, because testdisk and fdisk fundenentally disagree about heads, sectors and each throws large numbers of worrisome errors but goes ahead and makes guesses anyhow

The first part of the drive is an operating system of it's own if you want to use the other part as boot device just use unetbootin it will only write to the storage part of the drive.

Thanks Eddy1, but I won't bother. It's a 4 Gig drive, with 2.6 gigs on the catalogue partition, and 1.4 in the partition. I tried copying the catalogue to the partition, and ran out of space.

I also copied the catalogue to my ~/ and tried it under wine. To my Amazement, it worked with this single error :-o.
Now I have got a 'recenly decent' wine git version (~1.4) but that's pretty respectable.

It's _not_ a U3 flash drive, apparently. Both of the u3 removal tools (win and linux) failed on scsi command errors. It's an Alcor Flash Drive, which is worse. Even U3 is passe, and has been replaced by some cobble together of Sandisk and m$

Alcor have some reprogrammable drive, it seems. I saw someone was selling 4G drives as 16G drives (held the last 4 gig). I ended up ready for a home for the bewildered chasing links around in circles for alcor reprogramming tools. They reference the pci id, which in my case is
Mine is a 4 gig, of which linux only sees 1.4G. The partition begins on sector 1672, so I ran dd on the first 1671 sectors and it's HERE

I have some .deb that's supposed to reprogram the drive, but I need to cobble it into a slackware pkg for myself. Tomorrow. Enough time today wasted.

***EDIT*** I passed the thing to my son, telling him it was 1.4G atm and he had to fight it to make it 4G. Solved!