Lost in Flash Drive PCI USB SCSI hotplug, etc.

[Walt Pawley]

I posted the following as two notes on the newbie list. Apparently we
newbies aren't up to it or find it too simplistic. In any case, I remain
too ignorant to figure out what to do ...

--

I finally got YDL 3.0.1 up on a Beige G3 (FWIW, it seems that some choices
of major install types led to anaconda crashes but server install with
add-ons seemed to work OK). After mucking about getting X running (very
poor appearance until the "right" video was selected - completely by trial
an error - should be more directed IMHO) I shut down, plugged a combo USB
2.0/FireWire card into a PCI slot and fired it back up. It informed me that
I'd mucked with the hardware and gave me a choice to supporting it or not.
I choose to support it as this was my intent on plugging it in. Everything
seemed nominal enough when booting was finished and I'd had a chance to
startx, etc.

Now for the fun part - I plugged in a flash drive. Its little red LED went
flashity, flash, flash like I'm used to seeing and then everything set
there. Rather than bore you with all the machinations I've been through
attempting to figure out what to do to get the flash drive mounted, suffice
it say, I've been researching it for most of the day and getting more
confused by the hour.

Anyone have some pointers or out right direct procedures for getting at a
flash drive?

--

I'm still lost in Flash Limbo, ducking swirling man pages and dripping
Googoyles to oogle.

I've learned some things but still don't have things working.

First, it seems that USB Flash Drives get mapped into the SCSI disk device
mnemology. In my case, that's /dev/sda since I've no real SCSI stuff on the
system right now. This is not exactly intuitive to me nor was it more than
a surmise on my part to come to this belief. You'd think that somewhere,
close at hand, there'd be something like a discourse of the logic of this
stuff. I'm clearly too ignorant to find it.

Anyway, I can do things like "hexdump -C /dev/sda | more" and read through
the bytes on the Flash Drive. I had formatted it last on a G5 running
Panther and I believe I'd chosen HFS+ but I didn't see a "wrapper"
partition nor any mention of it's "+ness" when running either parted or
pdisk against it - just the partition map and one data volume (and pdisk
shows the "extra").

I created a /mnt/flash directory to use as a mount point. Apparently one
must do a "modprobe libhfsplus" or "modprobe libhfs" (as I recall) to get
the mount command to believe it can do something with a "-t hfsplus" or "-t
hfs" option. But even doing that first, none of the mount commands I could
sensibly conjure did anything but flash the Flash Drive's flashlight, tell
me it wasn't gonna and write an entry into /var/log/messages that whatever
I was looking for (either hfs or hfs+) could not be found amidst all that
flashing.

Still looking for clues ...
    and still crazy after all these years.

-- 
Walter M. Pawley <walt@wump.org>
Wump Research & Company
676 River Bend Road, Roseburg, OR 97470
         541-672-8975