I have RH 8.0 on my laptop (Compaq Pressario 3080us), alongwith M$ XP. The USB drive is easily recognized on the M$ partition.

Since there is some amount of tweaking to be done for the drive to be recognised on linux, I searched the net and got an article at

"Using a USB flash drive with Linux"
<sorry had to remove the URL - forum rules for new members>

Basically I did the following.

1. insmod'ed usb-storage
2. Added a new line in the /etc/fstab
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbstick vfat user,noauto,umask=0 0 0
3. Created a directory /mnt/usbstick
4. Plugged in my flash drive
5. Did (on a second terminal)
tail -s 3 -f /var/log/messages
to see if the drive was detected. It was NOT.
6. Obviously I couldnt mount /dev/sda1 as the device was not detected. Btw, I tried to mount it without success.

Please let me know what I am doing wrong here. Has anyone placed this issue before.

Thanks,

The problem is not you. The problem is with SanDisk only supporting Windows and Macs.

I have the exact same device as you, and I managed to get it working (somewhat) in Gentoo 1.4.

First, I did everything that you did, then:

1. Unplugged/replugged in the drive. On my machine it gets noticed every time on the second try if not the first.

2. Checked dmesg.. noticed.

3. /dev/sda1 not a valid block device. (What??)

4. su; rmmod usb-storage; insmod usb-storage

5. mount /dev/sda1 (I have the same fstab entry as you).

6. Works. If it doesn't, I repeat steps 1 to 5 until it does.


I found that as soon as I got it working, I zero'd it:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=4096

and made a filesystem:

mkdosfs /dev/sda1

and I was able to mount and unmount pretty much normally and on the first plugin/try.

But soon that went to hell and the fs got corrupted.
So, I guess we are stuck with crappy products thanks to the brilliant geniuses and SanDisk, who cut their market for the Cruzer Mini in half to save some bucks. I'm sure they have pissed off many-a-customer.

Troy

Oops.

I should clear up that my step 2.5 was to 'mount /dev/sda1', then the result is step 3.

SanDisk Cruzer support is hit and miss.

One factor is making sure you have all of the scsi services enabled. The USB Mass Storage devices are all emulated as a scsi device. Also you need to make sure you have the usb-storage module installed. Do a lsmod as root to see if the module is loaded. If not, then do an insmod to install it.

In addition to these problems, you may have others as well. For instance, my Desktop computer has no problems with mounting my SanDisk Cruzer Mini 128, but my laptop,... lost cause. I don't know if it's because of the USB chipset support in the USB modules or what...

On my desktop machine though, I have to umount with the lazy option as root to unmount... Unless I am doing something drastically wrong...

So there are issues with the SanDisk Cruzers. It's worth noting however, that the single slot SanDisk SD Card USB readers usually work without issue... Strange. You'd think they were the same technology.