Installing USB Pen Drive
 

Hey All,

I'm having trouble installing my pen drive in slackware, I don't know where to start. I understand that I have to set a mount point, but how do I do that?

the usual mounting of a usb pen drive is like this:
mount -t vfat /dev/sdaX /some/directory

-t vfat meaning that it is formatted with fat

/dev/sdaX: you may need to play around with this a little to find exactly which drive letter it is. it could sda1 like it could be sdb1, etc.

and if you want to be able to hotplug your pen drive... you'll need hotplug running on your box.

Check to see if your kernel is recognizing your USB hardware. Type dmesg and look for lines such as:

usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
ehci-hcd.c: USB 2.0 support enabled, EHCI rev 1. 0
hub.c: USB hub found
hub.c: 6 ports detected
uhci.c: USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver v1.1
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:10.0
PCI: Sharing IRQ 11 with 00:12.0
uhci.c: USB UHCI at I/O 0xd000, IRQ 11
usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
hub.c: USB hub found
hub.c: 2 ports detected
PCI: Found IRQ 5 for device 00:10.1
uhci.c: USB UHCI at I/O 0xd400, IRQ 5

Type lsusb and see what it lists. You should see lines for Bus 001, Device 001, etc. Plug in your pen drive and type lsusb again. If the list changes, you're making progress. :)
Type dmesg again and look for messages at the bottom concerned with usb. In particular, look for something like

Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 253952 512-byte hdwr sectors (130 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: sda1

If you see that, you have found your pen drive. mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb (or wherever you want), and you're off and running! :D

--Barry