I just installed SUSE 10.1, and everything seems to work OK... except when I tried to use my USB flash drive (Memorex 256 MB, if that matters) The system recognizes the device when I insert it, but when I select "open in new window", Konqeror gives me an error message, with "invalid filesystem type." When I looked up in sysinfo, it says the filesystem is vfat.

My questions are:

1) What should I do with the system, the flash drive, or both to make it work?
2) Will I lose the data on the flash drive in the process?
3) Will I be able to use the flash drive with Windows computers afterwards? Because if I won't, the flash drive is practically useless to me.

Thank you. It's hardly an emergency--I can work with Windows for now if I need that flash drive, but it is rather annoying.

EX21

I can't tell you exactly what the problem is in Knoqueror, but have you tried viewing the contents of the drive on the command line? If you can find out where it is mounted, you can try to move into that directory to see if everything is there. What I would try is to see if I can get into that directory in a bash shell, copy all of the things off of it, and then reformat into Fat32. I know that this may not be the most preferred method of handling it, but it might just fix it.

To answer the rest of the questions, you really shouldn't have any real problems reading a vfat (Fat32) partition in linux, and Windows reads them fine (I think anything above 95 reads Fat32 perfectly but don't quote me on that).

I had a similar problem with an external hard drive under Ubuntu.. Fortunately, the data that was on my drive was not critical, and was already stored on a backup DVD... I ended up formatting the drive in ext3, then it worked perfectly.

Hope that helps...

IGF

If you need the flash drive in windows though, don't use ext3 as it won't read it (by default that is)

Should have made that clear, since I don't use Windows anymore, I often forget many still share drives, partitions, etc.

Sorry for any confusion..

IGF