Problem with USB flash drive
 

Hi all,

I am having a small problem with one of my usb flash drives. I currently have two drives, one is a Kingston DataTraveler II and the other is a Memorex Traveldrive. At one point, both worked on my Debian "Sarge" system, but now only the Kingston will mount up. Both work fine under Windows XP and also under Ubuntu 5.04. I have even gone so far as to reformat the Memorex drive using FAT32, but still no luck. Here is the output of dmesg | tail when Gnome-Volume-Manager tries to mount the Memorex drive.

dmesg | tail

Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378393
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378394
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378395
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378396
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378397
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378398
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378399
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 508378384
FAT: invalid media value (0xb9)
VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sda1.

Here is the relevant line from my /etc/fstab

/dev/sda1 /media/usbdisk vfat rw,user,noauto 0 0

Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance

Welcome to LQ!

Can you post the output of "/sbin/fdisk -l" with that drive mounted?

It looks like the partition table might be messed up. I had a flash
drive that began giving me problems, first with intermittent mount
issues. I finally rewrote the partition table with "cfdisk" and then
formatted it with "/sbin/mkdosfs -c -F32 -v /mnt/usb/" and it now
works fine again.

It was given to me formatted by a Windows box, which I thought
was the best for FAT32 filesystems. Seems I stand corrected. ;)

P.S. Check out this I found on Google. Look familiar?
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-L...4-12/4374.html

Thanks for your help.

I rewrote the partition table with cfdisk and then reformatted as FAT32 with mkfs and it is working now.

Glad I had that experience to share...and glad your drive is okay.
I was quite surprised that Linux tools worked better for FAT filesystems
than Winders tools. I shouldn't be, though.