[Wylug-help] Rescue with knoppix

[Towle, William]

> there is also a "weird" behaviour on my Fedora3 as one 
> pen drive is 
> recognised as /dev/sda and the other as /dev/sda1 when they 
> are solely 
> connected.... It might have to do something with how the pen 
> drives are 
> partitiioned.

  That's right: one will have a partition table with at
least one file system, and the other has just a file
system - as `fdisk -l ...` and/or `file -s ...` will
attest.

  It is traditional for /dev/sda to refer to the whole
device, ie. the partition table plus the partitions which
follow it - but there's nothing to stop you dispensing with
partitions altogether and using the whole device to put a
file system on (exactly like floppies*, in fact). It's
likely that certain other OSes wouldn't recognise what
you've done, however.

Cheers,
  Wills.

* Conversely, there's nothing technically wrong with the
idea of partitioning a floppy - but that's a whole
'nother conversation.