So I picked up a flash drive.
And I'm using Gentoo.
With the 2.6.11 kernel.

I have hotplug installed, and my system uses SCSI drives.

When I plug in the drive and run dmesg, I get this:

usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2

Um.. now what do I do? I've poked around how-to's, but they all seem to be for the 2.4 kernel.

Ah, you've come to the right place!

In order to use a USB Flash Drive (aka "Mass Storage Device"), you'll actually need several key components in your kernel, or loaded as modules. These include USB Mass Storage (CONFIG_USB_STORAGE), SCSI Generic Support (CONFIG_CHR_DEV_SG), and SCSI Disk Support (CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD). Obviously, general USB support as well, but as your system has detected the USB device, so you have that.

For your greatest simplicity, you'll want to install the hotplug service and set it start at boot (rc-update add hotplug default). Make sure you've loaded the sd_mod kernel modules.

With these modules loaded and the hotplug service running (which is, I believe, optional) you should be good to go. Plug in your USB Flash drive and it should show up as a /dev/sdXN, where XN will be "a1" if you have no other SCSI/USB devices on the system.

For gentoo-specific USB Mass Storage configuration, you can check out this HOWTO from the Gentoo Linux Wiki.

If you'd like, you can udev to recognize the device by specific name, serial number, or similar, and give it a more friendly name like /dev/jumpdrive.

If you have any problems with these steps, let me know, and I'd be glad to help you debug it and get it up and running.

spankmeister7,

Try doing a 'dmesg' to find out where the flash drive was associated. It should be a /dev/sdX. If it's already formatted, simply mount that partition.

ex. mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash

If it isn't already formatted, format it with the fsck of whatever file structure you want on there (vfat is recommended if you want to be able to go back and forth between M$ boxes).

Thanks for the quick responses!

Since my system is already primarily SCSI based, I already have scsi generic and scsi disk support compiled into the kernel.
My main SCSI drive partitions already show up as /dev/sda, /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2.

When I run sg_map I get:
/dev/sg0 /dev/sda
/dev/sg1 /dev/scd0
/dev/sg2 /dev/nst0
/dev/sg3 /dev/scd1

Which correspond to my scsi hard drive, scsi cd-burner, scsi tape drive, and scsi dvd-rom drive.

What module is sd_mod?

When I run dmesg there is no reference to /dev/sd-anything.