unable to mount usb pen drive in redhat 9.0
 

Hello all,

I would greatly appreciate any help you can give concerning this issue. I have a usb pen drive which i can mount just fine under Mandrake 9.0, but I need to mount it under RedHat 9.0 also.

Under Mandrake, I use:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/flash

to mount the pen drive and it works fine.

Under RedHat, I get the following message when I attempt to use the same command:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda, or too many mounted file sytems

Also, when I plug the drive in, I get the following messages in /var/log/messages:

Nov 10 18:13:04 buz devlabel: devlabel service started/restarted
Nov 10 18:13:07 buz kernel: hub.c: new USB device 00:1f.4-1, assigned address 10
Nov 10 18:13:07 buz kernel: hub.c: USB hub found
Nov 10 18:13:07 buz kernel: hub.c: 1 port detected
Nov 10 18:13:07 buz kernel: usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status 3, frame# 340
Nov 10 18:13:07 buz kernel: hub.c: new USB device 00:1f.4-1.1, assigned address 11
Nov 10 18:13:10 buz /etc/hotplug/usb.agent: Setup usbcore for USB product 67b/2515/1
Nov 10 18:13:10 buz /etc/hotplug/usb.agent: Setup usbcore for USB product 67b/2515/1
Nov 10 18:13:10 buz kernel: sda : READ CAPACITY failed.
Nov 10 18:13:10 buz kernel: sda : status = 1, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
Nov 10 18:13:10 buz kernel: Current sd00:00: sense key Not Ready
Nov 10 18:13:10 buz kernel: Additional sense indicates Medium not present
Nov 10 18:13:10 buz kernel: sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
Nov 10 18:13:10 buz kernel: sda: Write Protect is off
Nov 10 18:13:10 buz kernel: sda: I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
Nov 10 18:13:10 buz kernel: I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
Nov 10 18:13:10 buz kernel: unable to read partition table

Thanks for any help :)

weird. do you have the same kernel versions on both distros?

I had the same problem with an USB drive in Redhat 9.
I did not try Mandrake, but I suspect it has something to do with a difference in vfat support implementation.
Here's what I did:
I used fdisk in Redhat to erase the vfat partition, I created an new vfat partition and formatted it.
After I mounted then, I had access and it worked.
It also still worked in Wincrap.

Hope this solves your prob,

:)

Thanks for the thoughts. I originally formatted the pen drive using windows, so attempting to partition it using fdisk seems like a good idea. That would also explain the unable to read partition message in the log file. I was also going to attempt to update the redhat kernel using up2date to see if that changes anything.

Any other thoughts on theis would be much appreciated :)

Just a thought - You might have the dev number wrong
mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/flash
should be:
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash

Try that. That is what I used.

I already thought of that enigma...forgot to mention it. I've tried sda1-4, sdb1-4, etc. i mount the drive fine as just plain sda under the mandrake system (no other scsi devices connected). there are no scsi devices on the redhat system either. plus the log file tells me that the pen drive is being enumerated under /dev/sda.

Windows treats usb devices like floppy disks and doesn't seem to require a valid partition table. Linux treats them as disk-drives and requires a valid partition table. You may also have problems due to bad usb implementations on some makes of drives.
See my web page for a blow by blow account of getting one brand of drive to work...

http://users.actrix.co.nz/michael/usbmount.html

in case anyone else runs in to this problem, the easiest solution I discovered was to update the redhat linux kernel to the latest version. i guess something was broken with the default kernel shipped with rh9. peace.

Removable device issue in Red Hat Linux 9
 

Hi,

I too had the issue in adding a device with the computer.
I could view the device, but unable to transfer the data or any other contents after performing several steps.

Please help me in this regard,

Yours - Krish.

Krishss2k6 - this thread is over 3 years old now. You should have started a new thread instead of bringing this one back to life.

Redhat 9 is also very old - Redhat stopped supporting it in May 2004. I strongly recommend that you get a more recent distro. Fedora Core is the successor to the community Redhat releases, and the current release is Core 6. Alternatively, Ubuntu is an excellent distro for newbies.

I think you will find that updgrading to any recent distro will solve your problem. You will also get a much better "experience", since all the software has been updated.

I hope this helps
--Ian