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Old 06-10-2003, 03:17 PM   #1
BongFish
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Registered: Jun 2003
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Problems with USB pendrive, TOTAL n00b


Hi People!
I had never seen linux until two days ago when I got my hands on Mandrake 9.1, after 3 (Three!) installations to get to know what I needed and didn't need to install I've started to get the general hang of Linux however.....

I really need to be able to access my little USB pendrive to move files back and forth from my XP box to my old Linux box.

I have edited the USB.config file to allow USB devices to be used as mass storage and now it appears as src (or something like that) in Harddrake.

When I press configure it asked me to format it like a hard-disk, I did this as it seemed to think it already had several 300 GIGABYTE partitions on it! Anyway it partitioned as a FAT32 disk to the correct size. Loads of strange icons appeared on my KDE desktop called strange things. dynamic Probing and dynamicProcessing. These appear the second I insert the device. When I click on them I get "Error - Could not mount device, the reported error was mount can't find Probin gin /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab" or the same with Processing instead of probing.

It won't let me delete them, I'll get onto this later...

A device called 'removable' turned up in my /mnt/ directory but when I copy files to it nothing happens, they appear to be there however even when I remove the drive they stay there! Even after a reboot! They are being written to the hard drive some where obviously but why lie to me saying its a removable device? It's a conspiracy.

I also have a permissions problem, many files, even ones that I've created have funny permissions, not allowing me to do anything with them and even after changing them with chown and chmod and checking with ls -l they won't budge. They aren't anything system critical, just random things. Why could this be? It's driving me MAD!

Anyway any help is much appreciated and any other tips would be much appreciated too, I don't really know what the hell I'm doing and I have little time to learn (I'm in the middle of my GCSE exams).

UPDATE! I deleted the removeable device in /mnt/ as it obviously wasnt my removeable device, Icons still appear when I pop the drive in.

Cheers,

Last edited by BongFish; 06-10-2003 at 03:24 PM.
 
Old 06-10-2003, 06:23 PM   #2
Thymox
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Welcome to LQ.

Let's back up a little here. Firstly, may I suggest that you go into Windows and re-format the pendrive from there - as Fat32, and add a couple of files to it.

Then, boot into Linux but do not boot with the pendrive attached - boot with it in your hand, not on the computer. Once it's up and running, plug in the device then open up a terminal (the thing that looks like a dos box) and type the following:
cdrecord -scanbus
Look for a line like this::
Code:
2,0,0    200) 'Generic ' 'Traveling Disk  ' '1.11' Removable Disk
If you have something similar, then lets play!

When you insert the pendrive, Linux sees it's a new usb device, and probes for it. It sees that it's a removable 'mass' storage device, and treats it like a removable scsi disk. With this in mind, we can look to see where it is:
Code:
ls /dev/sd* -l
If you have no other scsi disks (and I include ata/ide Zip drives in that) then it should come back with /dev/sda. If so, then we have found the device. Just check that it is working ok. For this next bit, you will need to change to root (type su root, press enter and then enter root's password).
fdisk -l /dev/sda (presuming it was /dev/sda).
It should come back with some information about the partitions on your pendrive. If all is OK, then it should only list 1 partition, /dev/sda1.

If you're still with me, then we'll get on with it.

Mandy 9.1 automagically tries to mount devices for you, and I find it annoying. However, it can be useful. It should have made a directory /mnt/removable. Check to see if your files are in there (remember you put files on it above). If so, then you should be ready to rock and roll with it - but remember that you should, under KDE, right-click on the icon and unmount the device first, just like you should under Windows.

If there were no files there, then check the file /etc/fstab and look to see if there is an entry for /mnt/removable. If so, then at the terminal, type mount /mnt/removable and check again to see if your files are there.

Hopefully you should be up and running now.

Just a quick note, though: there should have been no need to edit usb.config, or whatever. It should work out of the box.

Hope this helps.
 
Old 06-10-2003, 06:25 PM   #3
Genesee
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Hi Bong -

I don't know the device you're using, but here is a great site with tons of general and device-specific USB info:

http://www.linux-usb.org/

also check www.tldp.org and the LOLL in my signature below.

did you try mounting it from the command line - in a console type 'man mount' for all the options on mounting - I don't know, but maybe searching this forum for posts on mounting USB digital cameras can provide some guidance.

as for permissions - only the owner of the file, or root, can change them - type 'ls -l' in a console to see the owner. to change to root type 'su' - if you can't change the permissions as root, then got me...

good luck


EDIT: was posting simultaneously with thymox - thanks for info thymox

Last edited by Genesee; 06-10-2003 at 06:28 PM.
 
Old 06-11-2003, 05:19 AM   #4
BongFish
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Sorry to be a pain, but...

cdrecord isn't a command on my system for some reason, so I couldn't do the first step but the second step worked, I have sda and sda1.

/mnt/removeable/ did appear but the files did not in KDE or the console, there was a line for it in fstab though.

When i try to copy files to it it says I don't have permission.
 
Old 06-11-2003, 05:34 AM   #5
BongFish
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Erm, it just decided to start working... ???

It wasn't working 10 minutes ago but now it is, I didn't even toutch anything.

I wish I knew what I was doing.

Thanks for the help!
 
Old 06-11-2003, 05:40 PM   #6
Thymox
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Hehe! That is why they call it 'Plug & Pray'.

You possibly don't have cdrecord on your system because you have not installed cdrecording programs? Also, the command dmesg should become your friend - it can tell you tonnes about what is going on in your system.

Good to hear that it is working.
 
Old 06-12-2003, 05:57 AM   #7
BongFish
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Yeah, I just found out I have 'The Cooker' version of Mandrake.

The #*@!£$?'s at buylinuxnow.co.uk sent it to me instead of Bamboo, I'm trying to get them to send me the proper version now. I recon my problems could be something to do with that.

It worked once then stopped but I got it sorted now.

I manually edited fstab and I just type mount /mnt/pendrive when I want to use it.

If only there was a way to get rid of the dynamicAdding etc icons that appear!

Cheers

Last edited by BongFish; 06-12-2003 at 01:03 PM.
 
Old 06-13-2003, 05:57 AM   #8
Thymox
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To get rid of the dynamic adding of icons, stop using KDE/Gnome

If I were you, I would get the Bamboo version - as you have already found out, the cooker version is the unstable (but often quite stable - just a labelling thing). You might want to chech out which version of the kernel you're running with:uname -r. If it is a 2.5 kernel, then you're definietely in development territory.
 
Old 06-13-2003, 06:38 AM   #9
BongFish
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Its actually only 2.4.21.

Most of the time it's fine, I didn't know it was a dev version till I had a look on the Mandrake site.

The only real stability problems have been in Gnome with nautilus, it would crash the system whenever I clicked on a text file in it.

Oh well, the people at buylinuxnow.co.uk don't seem to care that they sent me dev software so I'll buy it off another site.

Last edited by BongFish; 06-13-2003 at 06:41 AM.
 
Old 08-09-2003, 04:05 PM   #10
snodnipper
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Post STEP BY STEP TO GETTING A PENDRIVE WORKING

I've had problems too!
HOWEVER - THIS IS HOW TO SOLVE IT!

Getting a USB PenDrive to work with Mandrake 9.1.
Scenario: all users need to be able to access, mount and write to it.
So insert the PenDrive while computer is off, boot Mandrake, wait for the autodetection.
Set the mount port, such as /mnt/removable
Exit

Now edit /etc/fstab – where all filesystem information goes, and put in the line:

/dev/sda5 /mnt/removable vfat rw,noauto,user 0 0

You need to be root to modify this.
su
<root password>
cd /etc
vi fstab
press 'i' to insert
modify the file (by inserting the text shown above)
press ESC
type ":wq" without quotes
enter/return

Reboot!
(shutdown -r now)

Should work fine, simply mount by typing "mount /mnt/removable"
and umount by typing "umount /mnt/removable"

(Can also mount easily from within KDE)

Oliver Snowden
9/8/2003
 
  


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