hi all,

i'm having random issues with my usb thumbdrive and i was wondering if it was possibly because of the version of hotplug that i have (hotplug-2004_01_05-noarch-3). the issues i've been having is that it will quite frequently (but not always) happen that I can't unmount the drive or things just lock up when i copy something over to it. not always though, but often enough for it to be a nuissance.

anyways, i was just wondering if anyone has had similar issues or there are known issues with the version of hotplug that i am running.

thanks in advance,
drisay.

I think the issue isn't hotplug but the 2.4 kernel and it's limits. 2.6.x works awesome tho.

thanks for the reply.

i'm not so sure about that though. although you may be correct, i was using 2.4 previously with the same version of hotplug and all was fine. i guess i should have mentionned this in the previous post, but i recently reinstalled and it's since then that things haven't been working quite right. now it seems that everything i plug in the drive, i can't unmount it and shutdown the pc takes about 20 times longer... about 10 minutes to do a shutdown.

is there a log file i could tail while i unmount the drive to see if there are any errors? does any one know of anything else i could try. i'm gonna try upgrading the version of hotplug, but i still haven't had the chance to.

maby you can try stopping hotplug itself before you shutdown, and see if you still get a 10 minute wait..
/etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug stop
(or something)

thanks for the idea. i'll give it a try.

i actually tried repartitioning/reformatting the usb drive and it appears to be ok now. i had recently formatted it on my win2k box at work and i guess for some reason that messed things up. although it was formatted to fat32.

but now for some reason i think the partition is fat16 because i had to use mkfs.msdos... i don't have mkfs.vfat on my system for some reason. how would i go about getting that?????

i can see how partioning in windows might confuse things, but i don't think it would hurt to format it in windows.

not sure... maybe for some reason it actually partitioned it as ntfs... but as soon as i reformatted it with another partition type... it was fine.

I still get some unmount problems with my drive, reviewed here http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/sh...p?product=2285

When mounting, try using this ::

mount -t vfat -o loop /dev/sdxy /mnt/yourDirectory

You mentioned that you don't have vfat, you can easily add the module to the kernel, or compile it as a standalone module.

cd /usr/src/linux
make xconfig

Go to 'File systems' tab/section

Make sureto select the option 'VFAT (Windows-95) fs support'either as a module or compiled into the kernel.

* Since you don't have it compiled into the kernel, I recommend you compile it as a module, that will save you time recompiling the whole kernel!

Save your settings and do this::

make dep
make modules
make modules_install

You might need to add this line to your rc.local file in /etc/rc.d
modprobe vfat

I hope that helps.