Usb disk corrupt, won't mount

guitara · 05-10-2006, 02:36 PM

I have a sigmatel usb flash drive (1 gig) that was orignally corrupted when it was not unmounted smoothly (My own fault long ago). I reformatted it after having a little diffuculty mounting it (Ended up having to use Windows, as linux refused). When it reformatted, it only showed the disk as 993 MB. I used it perfectly as such, until the other day, when I used it in Windows @ work, windows crashed and fragged the disk again. Reformating again (in Windows) now shows the drive as 980 mb. So I brought the drive back to my debian gnome box for "repair", and it won't mount in Linux, or in windows anymore. Here's the output from dmesg.

Code:

[4333042.452000] ohci_hcd 0000:00:02.1: wakeup
[4333042.731000] usb 2-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 8

[4333044.132000] scsi7 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[4333044.132000] usb-storage: device found at 8
[4333044.132000] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning

I know your first thought is -it's corrupt and a brick. But, it works as an mp3 player. I can still play the files that are already on it. After previous crashes, trying to boot the mp3 player resulted in an error (obviously). This time however I can still use it, but am unable to mount it. I'd like some help in properly manually formatting with something like parted to recover the lost space. Of course I'd be happy to just be able to mount it again. As a note, there doesn't appear to be a way to "reset" the mp3 player. I've since deleted all the files in an attempt to repair, but it still won't mount. Thanks for any help you can give.

Xolo · 05-10-2006, 03:22 PM

Well this might not be of much help, but in case you have warranty i'd try returning it. If there is no warranty left, i'd open it up (carefully ofcourse) to see if there's some vague way of forcing a hardware reset, because being an MP3 player it's still a small computer and that tiny board in there must have a few exposed, unused contacts that could possibly hide a reset function, but never had a button wired to it.
But you know, those flash chips really aren't all that robust all of the time.. depends on the manufacturer of the chips. I personally already lost one 512MB flash drive (Data corrupts after reading it), and a guy I work with managed to torch his 256MB flash drive by yanking it out of his pc without properly unmounting it from Windows 2000 when it refused to unmount (Can't hold partition information anymore).

vbisis · 05-11-2006, 01:11 AM

Maybe just the partition table is broken, so you might be able to fix the drive by deleting all partitions, create new ones and then format it again. Often did the trick for me when trying to make an usbstick bootable.

If fdisk or cfdisk from linux don't work, try booting from win98 bootdisk, I found the old dos f-disk does the best job on broken or mixed up partition tables.

Anyway your kernel messages just say to wait a little longer, I always see those lines and finally my drive appears as some sdx-device.

Good luck,

Isis

guitara · 05-11-2006, 01:22 AM

Thanks for your help.. Yes, the kernel tells me to wait longer.. and longer lol. It's never goes anywhere (weird). I booted a knoppix live cd, and managed to mount it, but the partition tables are still messed up. I'll try the old win floppy idea, but I've got no floppy drive hooked up to this (it's in the pc, but disconnected.. lazy me). Here's the new result from dmesg, this time using ubuntu dapper flight 7

Code:

[4295163.324000] ohci_hcd 0000:00:02.1: wakeup
[4295163.601000] usb 2-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2[4295165.001000] scsi1 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[4295165.001000] usb-storage: device found at 2
[4295165.001000] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[4295170.010000]   Vendor: SigmaTel  Model: MSCN              Rev: 0100
[4295170.010000]   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 04
[4295170.021000] SCSI device sde: 2034176 512-byte hdwr sectors (1041 MB)
[4295170.028000] sde: Write Protect is off
[4295170.028000] sde: Mode Sense: 38 00 00 00
[4295170.028000] sde: assuming drive cache: write through
[4295170.054000] SCSI device sde: 2034176 512-byte hdwr sectors (1041 MB)
[4295170.061000] sde: Write Protect is off
[4295170.061000] sde: Mode Sense: 38 00 00 00
[4295170.061000] sde: assuming drive cache: write through
[4295170.061000]  sde: sde1
[4295170.072000] sd 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sde
[4295170.072000] sd 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
[4295170.074000] usb-storage: device scan complete
[4295171.436000] FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems, filesystem will be case sensitive!
[4295171.745000] FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems, filesystem will be case sensitive!

As you can see it created two entries, and shows as two flash drives automounted in gnome. I guess this confirms the bad tables..

guitara · 05-11-2006, 02:39 AM

I was finally able to repair the disk using kanotix (love that distro) and cfdisk. Thanks all