I am dual booting XP and redhat 9

When I insert a flash disk or any othet usb device it is not being
detected by the os. If i check under devices it is no there as well.

What command do you have to use to configure the os so that it is abele
to detect the flash disk. Do you have to mount the device or what and how
do you go about mounting the flash disk.

May someone kindly explain hoew i get my redhat to be able to detect the
flash dis and when it is detected weher do i view it in order to retrieve
files from it.

The usb ports are working fine as they work when i boot with xp

Could you explain what kind of flash memory you have and what your hardware is. On some computers, a TI chip is used for sd card readers and I don't think that one is supported. However a usb pen drive should be detected.

Enter in the terminal: "sudo tail -f /var/log/messages". Then insert a pendrive. What messages do you see. Is a device (such as sdb1 created?)

some window managers like gnome or kde try to make the detection and mounting of external media as painless and automatic as some people come to expect with windows or macs. in other cases, more manual work is required.

if you haven't tried it already, you could try doing "fdisk -l" as root. That will tell you if the system sees the attached device's filesystem. Also, the command "dmesg" will print out all system messages originating from the kernel. It will usually say if it is has detected something, like a usb memory stick, once you insert it. "dmesg | tail " will print its most recent message, while you could use "dmesg | grep <pattern>" to search for a specific piece of text.

If the kernel sees them, and if the device's file system is seen and is valid, then you just need to mount the device using the mount command, maybe with something like "mount /dev/sde1 -t vfat /mnt/usb" (assuming such a mount point exists, and assuming the attached device is at /dev/sde1, etc).

assuming any or all of the above worked, there are various ways to make this whole procedure less painful. But that's another story.

-mark

Thanks for the commands. I found out that mu redhat does recognise the filesystem for my flash stick and the kernel did detect that there was a new device. usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage.

Having done that i was only left with mounting the usb device .
This is what i did

# mkdir –p /mnt/myflash -----creating a mount point

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/myflash -------mounting the flash disk

# cd /mnt/pen ------viewing the files
# ls –l

This worked for me.

You really should consider installing a distribution newer than Red Hat 9, as it's out of date and no longer supported.

ok thganx

do have any distributions in mind

If you like Red Hat, there's Fedora, but any of the major distributions are good really (see DistroWatch.com for info on many of the distros available).