Why can't I get my larger flash drive to work?
 

I have a 16 mg flash drive and a 256. The 16 is read and mounted when I plug it in and is useable. The 256 tries I think(the light flashes briefly) but then nothing. Why would one drive be read and the other not? I've tried various mounting and unmounting. What can I try? It works fine in Windows so I know it's a good drive.

/sbin/fdisk -l
shows the smaller drive is FAT12 and the larger is FAT16


I have Fedora Core 2 installed.

after you plug in the larger drive look in your /var/log/messages file and post the last few lines that relate to the flash device.

I thought I fixed it by creating a different directory named trek and then mounted /mnt/sda1 /mnt/trek. This worked until I logged out and then back in as a user instead of root. I can't get it to mount/work again.

Here is the log:

Nov 29 00:01:52 localhost kernel: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00
Nov 29 00:01:52 localhost kernel: SCSI device sdb: 503808 512-byte hdwr sectors (258 MB)
Nov 29 00:01:52 localhost kernel: sdb: Write Protect is off
Nov 29 00:01:52 localhost kernel: sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
Nov 29 00:01:52 localhost kernel: SCSI device sdb: 503808 512-byte hdwr sectors (258 MB)
Nov 29 00:01:52 localhost kernel: sdb: Write Protect is off
Nov 29 00:01:52 localhost kernel: sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
Nov 29 00:01:52 localhost kernel: sdb: sdb1
Nov 29 00:01:52 localhost kernel: Attached scsi removable disk sdb at scsi7, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Nov 29 00:01:52 localhost kernel: Attached scsi generic sg0 at scsi7, channel 0, id 0, lun 0, type 0
Nov 29 00:01:53 localhost scsi.agent[7294]: disk at /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.4/usb1/1-2/1-2:1.0/host7/target7:0:0/7:0:0:0
Nov 28 23:39:18 localhost kernel: scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device
Nov 28 23:39:18 localhost kernel: FAT: Directory bread(block 2003) failed
Nov 28 23:39:18 localhost kernel: scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device
Nov 28 23:39:18 localhost kernel: FAT: Directory bread(block 2000) failed
Nov 28 23:39:18 localhost kernel: scsi2 (0:0): rejecting I/O to dead device
It looks like bad blocks ? But it worked fine a minute ago :(

I'm thinking its a permissions thing, but when I try to change ownership, even in root it says operation not permitted .

Apparently all USB drives are not the same.
When doing manual mounts one of my drives required /dev/sda while the other required /dev/sda1. Auto mounting on some distros failed on one (I don't recall which).