ok, i guess I m on a good way to find the solution. the last du -hl command was typed in, when the flash drive hasn t been connected to the ts7260. now, that I connected it and booted the system again the /mnt folder is 1.8 GB big. so what I think is that the system launches all devices that are hooked up and starts the acquisition on its own. is this possible?

in the/root/SLG/LOG folder, that is part of the software is a file called syslog that contains:

......etc
Waiting for timing....... 0 SYSPAR read
Waiting for timing....... 0 SLG started with parameters: DIG_SA2 and CHA_SA2
Waiting for timing....... 0 Start memory ringbuffer OK
Waiting for timing....... 0 Start disk ringbuffer OK
Waiting for timing....... 0 Starting driver SADC24 Serial digitizer no. 0 OK
Waiting for timing....... 0 Start detection on channel: 0
Waiting for timing....... 0 Start detection on channel: 1
Waiting for timing....... 0 Start detection on channel: 2
Waiting for timing....... 0 Start detection OK
01/01/1998 00:00:39.000- 0 Start network detection OK
01/01/1998 00:00:39.000- 0 Start catalog OK
01/01/1998 00:00:39.000- 0 Start Manual Event ON OK
01/01/1998 00:00:39.000- 0 Start Manual Event OF OK
01/01/1998 00:22:35.000- 0 /mnt/cf/SLG/EVT//1998 does not exist. Create it !
01/01/1998 00:22:35.000- 0 /mnt/cf/SLG/EVT//1998/01 does not exist. Create it !
Waiting for timing...... ????????? Start server MUL_CLI_DPL OK
Waiting for timing...... ????????? Start server MUL_CLI_NET OK
Waiting for timing...... ????????? Start server MUL_CLI_EVT OK
Waiting for timing....... ********** Start SEISLOG **********
Waiting for timing...... ????????? Start server MUL_CLI_FIL OK
Waiting for timing....... 0 SYSPAR read
Waiting for timing....... 0 SLG started with parameters: DIG_SA2 and CHA_SA2
Waiting for timing....... 0 Start memory ringbuffer OK
Waiting for timing....... 0 Start disk ringbuffer OK
Waiting for timing....... 0 Starting driver SADC24 Serial digitizer no. 0 OK
Waiting for timing....... 0 Start detection on channel: 0
Waiting for timing....... 0 Start detection on channel: 1
Waiting for timing....... 0 Start detection on channel: 2
Waiting for timing....... 0 Start detection OK
01/01/1998 00:00:34.000- 0 Start network detection OK
01/01/1998 00:00:34.000- 0 Start catalog OK
01/01/1998 00:00:34.000- 0 Start Manual Event ON OK
01/01/1998 00:00:34.000- 0 Start Manual Event OF OK

how can I check if the usb drive mounts itself after every booting?

Yes it is possible. You can look at the output of the mount command to see if the drive is mounted.

Also, I've never tried to read ext2 using OSX so I can not provide help. Hopefully others will chime in.

Thanks a lot for your help! I appreciate it a lot!

One mor question: How can I have a look at the output of the mount command, if I don't mount the USB drive manually?

Cheers!

The output of the mount command without any options will show all mounted filesystems independent of how they were actually mounted.

In case you didn't already know, the TS-7260 is an ARM single board computer built by Technologics Systems. They have a fair bit of info on their web site, and also have a forum dedicated to their product line, which is fairly helpful and active.
From experience with others of their products, they tend to like the JFFS2 filesystem for storage on flash media. It is possible that the OEM that used this board also used that format on the USB drive. Most desktop oriented Linux's don't seem to have JFFS2 support by default, so you usually have to add it.
This sounds a bit suspicious. What do you mean by this? If the software runs, it must be possible to launch it somehow. If it gets launched automatically at boot time, there is some code that launches it, probably in /etc/init.d somewhere. What do you really mean by 'the commands are not supported by the OS'?

It is also possible, although rare, that the software does not use a filesystem on the media, but accesses the USB device directly. Ironically, I did this myself once on some software I wrote that read data from a seismology instrument, although the media was a floppy disk and the CPU was a few orders of magnitude weaker.

--- rod.

The output of the mount command in post 7 shows the flash drive being mounted as ext2. So we do not confuse the OP, the on board flash memory is JFFS2 and not the USB drive.