Are Kingston Pen drives compatible with Linux? I have serious problems in using it.
 

Hello, I am very desperate to get this Pen drive to work. Please help me out.

Problem: recently, I bought a Kingston Pen Drive. The cover says that it is supported by Windows and by Mac OS. When I asked the shopkeeper, he was not so sure about the support on Linux. But, I think it should be supported by Linux if it is supported by Mac.

Now, when I insert the Pen drive on Fedora 8, for sometime, everything is OK. But after sometime, it says that I do not have the "Write" permissions. I cannot delete from it. I am really frustrated. Even as root, I am not able to delete stuff from it. It says Read-only drive.

What to do? How to get it working? It works fine on Windows (I do not have this OS). I had the same problem on Debian and SUSE :)

I have put the /etc/fstab entry here:
The thing is, it is OK for sometime till I copy some files, but suddenly the error messages pop up. What to do?

I constantly use (1 Gig) Kingston USB sticks on Arch linux and Ubuntu Grunty (7.10) - on Grunty they even get recognised and mounted as "Kingston". Never seen any problem.

So now, what do I do? I have given all kind of permissions. I cannot delete any file as root. But if I reboot, I can do it for sometime (as I had mentioned), till I copy some files. After that, the problem occurs again.

Typically, these things get automatically recognized when they are plugged in. The mount point will be in /mnt or /media. The "mount" command with no arguments will tell you where. The entries in /etc/fstab are not relevant---those are only for devices to be automatically mounted at boot time.
Here is an excerpt from the output of the "mount" command after my pen-drive has been inserted:
Among other things, this tells me the device is formatted FAT, and is mounted read-write

Let's assume your device is getting mounted at /media/kingston. Go to /media, and do "ls -l" to see the permissions. Check this if the device stops working, gives error messages, etc. Also, post here the exact error messages.

Is it possible that your device has a "write-protect" switch? (A quick glance at the Kingston site doesn't give any info on this.)

Here is mine:
I cannot use chmod to change permissions. It says it is Read-only. Also, as you told, there is not "write-protect" switch on the stick. I know that some sticks have this.

I have a Laptop next to me, and I have Windows on that. I can Read-Write on the stick. But, on my Linux, it just does not work. Fedora 8 does support FAT.

With mine, I can use chmod (as root) to change the permissions..

When the drive is first mounted, what are the permissions? (ls -l /media/DEEPAKBM) The output of "mount" says it has been mounted read-write.

I don't know if this is relevant, but how did your pendrive get that name?

I suppose another thing to try would be to manually UNmount it and then mount it manually. (umount and mount commands)

I've used (and use) several Kingston USB pen drives/flash keys, and they've worked ok. One of them got fried, but the pc fried the same day, so I guess it wasn't because of the Kingston-made key..and I wonder why they still print the "compatible operating systems" at the back, since they should work in any operating system with usb ports and the usual drivers to handle such simple storage devices. Maybe it's just to make those users feel secure who aren't interested in small things.

The filesystem on the pen drives is usually FAT (FAT16 or 32), which doesn't hold permissions. Therefore when copying something onto the drive you might get a warning saying that permissions couldn't be set (or something like that). It's ok, and means what it says - but the data should be ok. You might want to check your drives' filesystem, and if it's not FAT, format it to FAT (if you plan to use it outside Linux) or some Linux format, like ext (if you plan to use with Linux only, or operating systems that have support for that filesystem you chose). The filesystem should not be NTFS, but if it is, get rid of it - it's rubbish :)

Thanks for the reply. The permissions when I mount are:
The file system is FAT. And yeah, as far as the name of the Pen drive is concerned (i.e., DEEPAKBM), I used it at the shop for the first time, just to check. He had Windows and I changed the name there!

I may change the file system to one of the 'ext' file systems, but then it may have issues on other OS's.

Now, here comes one more problem. I cannot even copy files from the USB stick. The output is:
I am really frustrated :( Please help me out.