[Scottish] USB Memory stick problem with SUSE

[ray]

On Wednesday 23 March 2005 08:01, Alan R wrote:
AR> I'm having some trubs with  USB mem stick.

Sorry I'm a bit retarded - only a week this time - but you don't seem to have 
a resolution posted; although you have probably worked it out for yourself by 
now.
I use SuSE 9.2 and buy lots of USB flash memory for distributing s/w to 
customers.

Although I recommend updates via YOU and/or fou4s, no version of 
SuSE9.2-KDE3.3/3.4 should exhibit usb device problems.

Problems mostly arise from the devices being poorly partitioned/formatted.  I 
have only had one batch (three years ago) that worked with non-MS out of the 
box.  Mostly they do not mount at all. My  solution is to delete the 
partitions with "fdisk /dev/sdx" create a new primary partition with cfdisk 
(or sfdisk), and then make a filesystem with "mkfs.vfat -F32 /dev/sdx1"  ("x" 
is probably "a" but depends on local circumstances).

Last weeks' delivery (Gigabyte 128MB and 1GB) mounted, but were unusable in 
the manner that you described. They appeared ok on a customer's MS WinXP 
machine. In fact a 1GB device could be "opened" with KDE3.4/konqueror, but 
crashed the machine when trying to write a 250MB file to it.   
"umount /dev/sdx1 ; mkfs.vfat -F32 /dev/sdx1 ; mount /dev/sdx1" got them 
working.

-- 
ray