Hi, and thanks!

I have had much success mounting and utilizing my USB flash drive in Linux and Windows however, when I switched to Debian Sarge the files were, and still, arn't recognized. The drive is mounted, and is recognized, but my files arn't present. What is there instead is a file called "001" and a document called "devices". In the file "001" there are two other files called "001" and "002". None of these files appear in Suse or windows. My fstab statment has the drive listed as a usbfs file system on my Suse machine and the Debian machine, but the one of the partioning programs on the Debian machine lists the drive as having a fat16 filesystem. When I change the fstab statement to recognize /dev/sda as a vfat filesystem is gives me an error stating that vfat is the wrong fs. Also, when I cange the fstab statement to recognize /dev/sda as an fat16 fs, mount tells me that fat16 is not regonizable, or something to that effect. I have updated the Kernel to 2.6 as opposed to the defalt 2.4 in hopes that something might change, but nothing (that i can see) did. The Debian machine is an old laptop, 333Mhz, 200MB RAM, running ICEwm. Any suggestions?

p.s. I do not have easy internet access where the computers are at, so I applogize for the lack of particulars

Debian has allot of security, could be you have no permission to it. Have you checked through Users/groups in Administration to see if there is something there that will allow you to access it. I'll fire up my old comp. with Sarge and see what happens with my two pen drives, it's been awhile since I've booted Sarge.

It had been 425 days since I last booted my Sarge, anyway, here is what I did to auto-mount my Sandisk Cruzer pen drive:


In user account

First:
I followed instructions here to set up fstab etc. Did not use upper case letters:
http://www.titan.co.nz/amigaak/AA020834f.htm#MUSB
Second:
I made a directory in /mnt called flash:
#mkdir /mnt/flash
Third:
I mounted the flash drive with command:
#mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash
Fourth:
I created desktop icon by right clicking the desktop and selected "create new/device/hard_disc_device".
On the General tab I selected "usbpendrive_mount" icon, on Device tab I selected "usbpendrive_unmount", and in Device field selected "/dev/sda1 (/mnt/flash) from drop down menu, in the permissions tab I gave both owner and group read and write, just read for others and clicked ok. Now I can access it in GUI by double clicking the icon. But could not un-mount as user, tried as root with command:
#umount /mnt/flash
And only got errors that /mnt/flash was busy. So I pulled it out as I made no changes to files within and re-booted the computer. When back in user account the un-mounted icon was there, plugged in the pen drive, the light flickered and stayed on, double clicked the icon and it mounted, the icon changed to mounted and the file browser appeared and all files were there. Made changes to a .txt file and saved them, right clicked the icon and selected "un-mount", the un-mount icon appeared, the light was still on but pulled the pen drive out anyway and all is cool.

NOTE: Probably did not have to mount via CLI as root, could have probably skipped that step. I could not mount my Transcend pen drive but can't mount it in Fedora neither. It was the first one I bought and bought it because it advertised "Linux compatible", maybe need to re-format it. If you have SCSI disk(s), you would have to put /dev/sdb1 in /etc/fstab, if you have two SCSI disks you would have to put /dev/sdc1 in /etc/fstab, etc.

I've seen quite a few different fstabs that use different locations for the pen/flash drive. This is the first time I've seen it located in the /mnt directory. I will go home and try that, but assuming that it doesn't matter whether I use /proc or /media as mount points I do get a message when trying to mount using vfat as opposed to usbfs as the fs mount argument it gives me some error saying that:

(I took this off another post having problems mounting FAT32 fs)

anymore advice?

Also, does it matter whether I'm using ICEwm or FluxBox or KDE or Xfce (Xcfe?)?

This error relates to a hard drive, not usb (sda) drive. The desktop manager type should not make a difference. I have KDE on Sarge.

So, there's a difference between sda and sda1. My fstab was set to mount sda, the drive and not sda1, the partition with my files on it. That would explain those strange files present on Sarge that weren't present on my other systems, and why my other files weren't visable. Once I changed my fstab to mount sda1 instead of sda my files were accessable!

thanks for your help!