Peak - 128 Mb pen drive

[Westy]

Hey, recently i have been getting problems with my PC not detecting my pen drive, it works at college, and on my brothers computer but not mine... its very annoying when i need to get work done fast, so i have to load them on my brothers computer and share them via the network.

USB drivers are updated to 2.0 dont know what else you can think of :(

But.. the usb drivers are not broke because every other usb device i have works in the ports.

Westy

[latency]

what happens when you plug it in?

Nothing?

Have you tried looking at the device manager to see if there's any reported errors or conflicts?

[Westy]

Correct, nothing atall, but if its plugged in when the comp is turned off, then i boot up, once on the desktop for like 10 seconds it restarts itself.

Ill take a look at the device manager once im home tonight.

[Westy]

Fixed, dont know what i did but its fixed, something in the device manager did it, thanks Lat

Westy

[latency]

lol I know I'm just that good ;)

[Westy]

Damn right you are :P i think i right clicked it and updated driver :P

[Moira]

Sorry to kind of hijack this thread, but does anyone know how to save files to a memory stick in linux?

I managed to get it configured and formatted for use on the linux partition of my laptop (through the mandrake control centre), but trying to save any data on it is impossible. You can save files in your home directory, but otherwise you don't have the necessary permissions to modify any other area.

This is ridiculous as I'm the only user of the system and the root admin. I opened a terminal and typed "su" which prompted me for my password and - as I understood - would log me in as root admin. However, beyond that I can't see a "connection" between this terminal and Kwrite, where I was trying to save a modification to the fstab file to mount and unmount the memory stick. It still told me I didn't have the relevant permissions to overwrite the file.

I then tried to run the chmod command to reset permissions, but obviously didn't get the syntax right and the help command was no help at all. So the memory stick just got yanked out of the laptop instead of being removed properly.

I know I probably won't ever use it for saving linux files as I've nowhere to transfer them in that format, I would just generally like to know how to modify something like the fstab file or save somewhere other than my home directory. The Disgo instructions tell you to make a folder in /mnt - I can't even do this :(

[stdPikachu]

That's cos Linux is paranoid by default. The pendrive will be FAT32, which is a filesystem without any concept of owners, groups, permissions or anything. Hence by default Linux allows only superusers to rwx it.

You can get around this by altering the line you use in /etc/fstab to look something like this:

sda1 /mnt/pendrive vfat noauto,user,uid=200 0 0

The important part is the uid=XXX, or you can substitute gid=XXX. The uid or gid number you need to put there is the user ID of your login, or the group ID of a group you belong to. You can hike this info out of /etc/passwd and /etc/groups.

[bLaXe]

Continuing the Linux hijack of the thread, I have been considering buying a USB enclosure for an IDE hard disc (aprox 250Gb). Would this work the same way as a memory stick? Would I be forced to use FAT32, asumming I would like to be able to read the data from Windows.

Any thoughts?

[stdPikachu]

FAT32 is the only file format that Linux and NT5 support natively. If you're willing to hack about with stuff endlessly, you can set up Captive NTFS under Linux (a wrapper that uses the native windows ntfs.sys to enable flawless read/write under NTFS in Linux, though the performance is a bit sucky), or use tools such as Explore2FS under windows to give you (limited) access to ext2/3 partitions. Alternatively you can live dangerously and try out an ext2/3 filesystem driver:

http://winext2fsd.sourceforge.net/
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ext2ifs.htm
http://sys.xiloo.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd

[bLaXe]

I'd looked at Captive NTFS but I'd rather not have performance suffer. Since I want to be able to use the usb drive with lots of computers, rather than just my own, so ideally I'd like it to work in windows without any hassle. Cative NTFS might be the way to go, since I don't fancy a 250GB FAT32 partition.

I'm considering just centralising all my data onto a filesever, and accessing everything over the network. To my mind that's the easiest way to share large amounts of data between windows and linux.

... stops hijacking thread...

[Moira]

I just tried that, but it won't let me save any changes to the /etc/fstab, telling me I should check whether I have write permission :(

[bLaXe]

You are editing fstab as root aren't you...?

[stdPikachu]

Moira, I'm assuming you're doing this via the GUI rather than the command line, and I don't know if MDK provides any GUI tools to elevate you to superuser. There are two tools that let you do this; su (superuser) and sudo (superuser do). You can type "man su" or "man sudo" in a terminal if you want the complete manual on how to use these programs.

If you can fire up a terminal and type something like:

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

it'll ask you for your root password, and then open up fstab in gedit (or whatever text editor you want to use) with root priveliges. If sudo doesn't work, you can type in "su -" instead, which will elevate you to root permanently until you type "exit".

After that you can do:

sudo mkdir /mnt/pendrive

to create your mount point. Your mount point doesn't have to be in /mnt, you can put it anywhere you like - such as /home/moira/pendrive for example. If you want to access those directories as a normal user, you may have to alter the permissions on them, as by default they're owned by the user that created them (root), and write access is usually denied to everyone else. That's a whole thread in itself, but reading the manuals for permission-changing tools like chown (change owner), chgrp (change group) and chmod (change [security] mode) will help you on your way.

HTH.

[Moira]

Many thanks! I'll give that a try and let you know how it goes.

[Moira]

OK, I've just tried that and had some success. I managed to edit the fstab file and was able to get root privileges - many thanks for that help.

These are the instructions from disgo:

http://www.mydisgo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31

Apart from the fact that I followed the advice from stdPikachu and called the memory stick "pendrive", I did exactly what was written. The stick is detected OK and probably I could save files in it. However, I came unstuck where it says "right click on the desktop and select Disks and Disgo". There is no icon on the desktop, so I still can't really see how to mount it.

However, I did manage to format the Disgo in hardrake so that's not a problem. The puzzle is how to unmount it when no icon has appeared on the desktop.

As it happens, I don't want to format the memory stick right now as it contains Access files that I need to work from in preparation for a MS Access exam next week. It would still be interesting to know how I'm expected to unmount the Disgo though .... and what happens to it if it's not properly unmounted?

Many thanks for all the help - I have at least found out how I can edit files with root privileges which I had no idea how to do before.

[stdPikachu]

Icons will only appear on your desktop if you've got some removable media monitoring daemon running, and I have no idea which ones MDK ships with any more. Frankly their instructions are cakehole and they probably only tested it on one distro.

Getting an automounter daemon running yourself would be a bit complicated, but you should be able to navigate to /mnt/pendrive in your file browser (such as konqueror or nautilus) and see the files there.

As for unmounting the drive, from the command line it's just a simple "umount /mnt/pendrive"; (un)mounting it graphically will depend highly on which DE you're running and whatever MDK have done with it.

(NB this is where someone a bit more clued up on MDK is meant to chip in ;))


Edit: just remembered that as well as uid= and gid=, you can also set umask=. Setting umask=000 will make the drive read/write/execute for all users.

[Moira]

Many thanks, you've given some fantastic help. I think the Disgo instructions are a bit cakehole too :)

Do you know why both Windows and Mandrake want the drive unmounted? ie
What happens to it if it's just pulled out of the computer? I have to do this when I take it to evening class, because the machines there just run 98 and there isn't an easy way to unmount it.

[stdPikachu]

If there's I/O going on on the USB key when you pull it out of the slot, there's a severe risk of filesystem corruption. You can lessen the risk of this under Linux by adding another option "sync" to your fstab. This causes all I/O to the device to be done synchronously (i.e. as soon as you ask it to happen, rather than queuing behind other tasks) so you have a better idea of when it's safe(r) to yank it if need be.

If you can't unmount it because the shell complains it's in use, try typing something like:

fuser /dev/sda1

in. This will usually return you a number (sometime followed by a letter), e.g. 12345. If you then list your processes and search for that number (or numbers) you'll be able to see what processes have a lock on it.

banquo root # fuser /usr/src/linux/
/usr/src/linux/: 10569c 13488c 13522c 13533c 15552c
banquo root # ps aux | grep 13488
root 13488 0.0 0.1 1884 816 pts/0 S+ 18:23 0:00 make menuconfig
root 15688 0.0 0.0 1428 508 pts/2 S+ 19:20 0:00 grep 13488

To the initiated, that'll show that root is logged in on a diffent session, and is currently configuring a new kernel. This is Linux's answer to "this file is currently in use and cannot be deleted" (although it is actually possible to delete a file whilst something else is using it).

[Moira]

Just printed out this thread as a useful guide for the future :)