USB Pen Drive Crisis

[Ug]

My USB Pen drive, has given up the ghost or so it appears. I get the following error when i try to mount it:mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device It appears that a block on the device has become corrupted and this is preventing me from mounting it.

Does anyone know anyway, in which I can rescue this device? By finding the bad blocks on it and repairing them?

[djf_jeff]

I have see some usb device that have no partition (so it's directly on sda and not sda1). Another case is that you have something mount as sda and you pen drive become sdb1...

Check the /var/log/message to see where your pen drive is link

[mhelios]

Have you checked it with:

fsck /dev/sda1

Also run:

fdisk -l /dev/sda

to check that it's being detected.

[Ug]

When I fsck it I get:[root@localhost gareth]# /sbin/fsck /dev/sda1
fsck 1.34 (25-Jul-2003)
e2fsck 1.34 (25-Jul-2003)
fsck.ext2: No such device or address while trying to open /dev/sda1
Possibly non-existent or swap device? And i get nothing when i Fdisk it.

[Avatraxiom]

Are you certain it's mounting at sda? If you have any SCSI (or, I think, any ide-scsi...), you might want to try /dev/sdb.

Was it working on sda before?

-M

[Ug]

Definately working on SDA before. I'd never had a problem with it.

[Avatraxiom]

Originally posted by Ug
Definately working on SDA before. I'd never had a problem with it.

Then it's probably given up the ghost. At work, I usually test these things by plugging them into different O/Ses in the test lab (where I have five computers that each run six different O/Ses on different partitions) and see if they start magically working. If they don't, they're usually dead meat.

If you don't have that capability, it's probably not too risky to toss it in the garbage. You do have to watch out for it exploding suddenly into flames when it touches the trash-can liner, though. ;-)

I think that new pen drives aren't too 'spensive nowadays. Of course, when one is a student, McDonald's can be expensive. (I almost said "Taco Bell," since they're even cheaper, but I'm not sure you have them over there...)

-M

[Ug]

I've never seen a Taco Bell except on an American TV program.

But yea i've tried it on Windows too, and it was fooked then too.

[Avatraxiom]

Sounds like the fookage is complete, then.

[Ug]

Damn.

[sigusr]

Have yoy tried "fdisk -l" without other options? If the device has been bumped up the scsi chain this will locate it.

I also have a pendrive problem. Hope you can help. I am a linux newby. I can only write to my pendrive from the root account. Automount works in other accounts with read only access. "chmod" will not work from root account console. I hope the following info helps.

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 31 MB, 31981568 bytes
4 heads, 32 sectors/track, 488 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 128 * 512 = 65536 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 487 31152 4 FAT16 <32M




contents of fstab

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive auto auto,user,rw 0 0



# ls -l
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 16384 Mar 24 11:44 usbdrive



[ root]# chmod 777 /mnt/usbdrive
chmod: changing permissions of `/mnt/usbdrive' (requested: 0777, actual: 0755): Operation not permitted
[ root]#

I hope this helps you and thanks in advance for your help.

[Ug]

No the problem with mine, is a bad block. ;)

[Darkmage]

Originally posted by Ug
My USB Pen drive, has given up the ghost or so it appears. I get the following error when i try to mount it:mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device It appears that a block on the device has become corrupted and this is preventing me from mounting it.

Does anyone know anyway, in which I can rescue this device? By finding the bad blocks on it and repairing them?

Here is a solution /dev/sda1 (http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200310/msg05425.html)

You need two modules in the kernel
scsi disk support and usb mass storage support

[Ug]

It used to work, so thats not the solution i'm afraid. The problem is it used to work, but now it's corrupted and dosen't.

[Darkmage]

I had the same problem till I enabled scsi disk support in the kernel modules and it worked fine afterwards.
Are you running a custom kernel?

[Ug]

Nope the default one. The thing worked but is corrupted - a bad block. Nothing SCSI support will fix. ;)

[Jman]

Originally posted by sigusr
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive auto auto,user,rw 0 0

When you use the user option only the user that mounted it can do anything with it. Changing user to users will allow anyone to mount and umount it. See man mount for details.

My family has one of these usb things. Nautilus is nice enough to recgonize the fstab entry and put a list on the desktop of drives. Right click desktop, flashdrive, mounted! Of course it's picky and wants me to unmount it before I remove it. Oh well.

[ezeze5000]

I'm running FC test

I had to do several things to be able to use my

Lexar Pin Drive

In order for my Linux box and my Win XP box to recognise

the pin drive I had to format it as a FAT 32 drive.

I had to format it on the Win XP box.

Now I can use it on both machines.

I still have some problems unmounting it, but I think it has

something to do with the 4 port hub I am using.

Before I formated the pin drive I got the error

"unknown format cannot mount"

I hope this helps.

[Ug]

Not really. Because its a bad block problem. ;)

I used to have it formatted with fat 32, and it worked fine for 3 months.

[reddwarf2956]

I am wondering if mine is having the same problem. But I can do a few things to "see" it. One is looking at /var/log/messages, the other is System Tools --> Hardware Browser there it shows up as a System Device made by SigmaTel. If you can do this, it may be the hotplug is broke?

But I have the same statements that you have Ug, I know that it works the last time I used it on a win98 machine before the machine crashed and I lost the drivers for it. I was wonder if Linux has driver and was pointed to the fact that there are hotplug services for it. Which ones, I don't know, if any one can point me to the correct services, thanks.

It is a CenDyne Gruvstick. Any kind of drivers Linux or Windoz will be great.

John

[sigusr]

I love my Lexar Jumpdrive. After trying every thing I could think of, asking every one I knew, and kicking it twice, I plugged it in the usb port and reinstalled FC1. Install added scsi kernal support and the driver. I have absolutely no idea how to do either of these things manually. I have since had some small permission glitches but happy with it I am. No more floppies for me.

If you have a cd writer installed you should have scsi kernal support installed. If the pen drive is installed on boot may be kudzu will find it?

I hope this helps in some small way.