Bought new flash drive 4G today. Running Mepis 3.4-3. Light on USB stick never quits flashing when inserted. Looking in terminal window with commands it appears that the hotplug function has a 10 second time out. When this time expires the system appears to restart to read the stick again but continually times out?
I am not a linux guru. Can one change this timeout setting somewhere or does package for reading USB need to be changed and recompiled? I don't even know what package is used.

I also read a comment in this thread about a Patriot USB stick with more than one partition for security causing problems. I have a Patriot unit.

Is my problem that the Stick is too large for the time alotted to read it or is the software having problems reading it because of the
two partitions?
Any help would be appreciated.

Hi, -

(By the way, Patriot seems to OEM the technology from USB Disk Pro, - which is the vendor actually reported by the device, mine anyway.) The size of the two partitions isn't the problem. Linux recognizes the device, but appears unable to read the partition table. So it times out, resets, and repeats, which is the cyclical behavior you're seeing. When you merge the partitions the size is the sum of the two originals, but the read of the partition table succeeds and the attach completes.

My suspicion is that the drive is doing something unusual in support of the security function, since I've partitioned flash drives with no problem.

eharbin:

Can you tell me more about how you joined the partitions?

Did you do this in Windows or in Linux?

I noticed that in Kinfocenter that the two flash drives are reported as USB Disk Pro devices under SCSI devices, but when I use the terminal window and try to use FDISK it reports that it cannot open the drive.

H...E..L...P..!

Frequently Asked Questions

Am I able to delete and combine the 2 partitions on my Patriot Xporter USB Flash Drive into 1 partition?

The 2 partition is actually a feature of our Xporter where one of the partition can be used as a secure and password protected partition for sensitive information. Our easy user interface allows the user to resize the secure partition to as small as 2MB. However, as of now you’re not able to delete or combine the 2 partition.

++++++++++++++
The patriot site says the two partitions can not be deleted or combined. http://www.patriotmem.com/support/faqp.jsp
8th question down.

IS there no way to join partitions? Is this FAQ from Patriot just CYOA from Patriot?

You might want to list which kernel modules are loaded. Maybe this list will help as a reference. I hope I didn't leave any usb drive related modules out.

ohci_hcd 19460 0
ehci_hcd 30216 0
usbcore 130600 6 usb_storage,usbhid,ohci_hcd,ehci_hcd,ndiswrapper
usb_storage 80960 0
usbhid 43296 0
scsi_mod 145328 3 sg,sr_mod,usb_storage
usbcore 130600 6 usb_storage,usbhid,ohci_hcd,ehci_hcd,ndiswrapper
ide_core 145380 4 usb_storage,ide_cd,amd74xx,ide_disk
sg 35240 0

If you could pick up a cheap 128MB thumb drive ( My grocery store sells the for under $20 ), it might be useful to see if it is detected properly.

Hi, -

Right, catch-22. You can't use fdisk until you've attached the drive.

But go to the Patriot website again, and go to the Downloads page. There's a USB Disk Pro resize utility for Windows. It let me resize my security partition to 0, after which the drive attached ok.