How will Red Hat 9 detect a USB flash drive?
 

Good day. I have a San Disk Cruzer flash drive. I also have Red Hat Linux 9.0 running on my laptop. If I am in the Windows environment, it detects the flash drive. But when I plug it while I am in Linux, nothing happens. How will Red Hat 9 detect my flash drive? What do I have to do?

Thanks...

I'll assume your running a kernel that supports both USB and SCSI Disk (sd_mod). Once you plug in the USB drive, wait 10 seconds and type dmesg, the output should list a new devices at /dev/sd_ and it will likely be /dev/sda, but that is up to the OS/udev to decide. Once you know that your usb drive is /dev/sda, then you can mount it with mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/usb assuming you have /mnt/usb created. You could mount it to any empty path you choose.

If your uncertain that the correct kernel modules are installed, post the output of lsmod and lspci so that we can talk you through the steps of enabling the correct modules.

I've never had problems with USB flash drives in RH(, but be advised that that distro is old and unsupported and if you want a lot of the more recent hotpluggable hardware to work you're well advised to upgrade to something newer like FC5. That being said, as long as you have the usb-storage module as well as the SCSI modules described by musicman_ace everything should work out of the box for something simple like a USB drive.

I have a similar problem with the latest version of CentOS running on a Dell Optiplex GX-240. Nothing happens when a USB HDD is plugged into any USB port on the computer.

I tried running lsmod and lspci but the commands were not found from the terminal.

Thank you