Lost in Flash Drive PCI USB SCSI hotplug, etc.

[Walt Pawley]

On 8/6/04 6:08 PM -0300, Marcelo Giles wrote on Re: Lost in Flash Drive PCI
USB SCSI hotplug, etc.

>Do you NEED to have it formatted for Mac OS? Perhaps you need to share
>files between Mac OS and Linux?

That would be nice.

>...
>This is from Disk Utility's help:
>...
>  WARNING: To prepare a disk in Windows format, you must erase the
>entire disk.

Thank you Marcelo! It took nearly an hour for it to sink through the skull
and then the head fat before it finally began to tickle a synapse or two.
The WARNING was the clue I needed to at least get things started.

>> changed to a "U"). I found it somewhat odd that Apple doesn't see fit
>> to
>> provide a DOS-ish format in Disk Utility. Perhaps I'm missing something
>> there as well ... sigh.

I had chosen the volume to erase in Disk Utility and that left me with only
choices that fit into the Apple partitioning scheme. MSDOS (FAT) is not
compatible, so there's no choice available. However, I finally realized
that it was my choice that was the limiting factor. I re-erased the flash
drive but chose the drive itself, not the volume on the drive.

Still I was not out of the woods yet. The following ...

# mount
/dev/hda8 on / type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
usbdevfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)

... indicated that once again, the Flash Drive was there. All that was
missing were the sugar plums.

I tried a number of mount commands ... all of which ended in some form of
"I ain't a gonna doit!" So then I tried...

# /sbin/pdisk -l /dev/sda
pdisk: No valid block 1 on '/dev/sda'

... because I've rather gotten used to the idea that pdisk is how one looks
for partitions. Apparently not if they're in MSDOS format (and probably
others). So I went over to parted and found out ...

(parted) p
Warning: The partition table on /dev/sda is inconsistent.  There are many
reasons why this might be the case.  Often, the reason is that Linux detected
the BIOS geometry incorrectly.  However, this does not appear to be the case
here.  It is safe to ignore,but ignoring may cause (fixable) problems with some
boot loaders, and may cause problems with FAT file systems.  Using LBA is
recommended.
Ignore Cancel ? i
Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-250.000 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor    Start       End     Type      Filesystem  Flags
1          0.004    250.000  primary   FAT

... Warning? Sheesh - Well, it says I can ignore it without causing undo
stress on something - surely listing what it finds should not be all that
damaging (as is the sort of thing one thinks which are subsequently quoted
as "famous last words"). So, once again I tried mounting ...

# mount -t msdos /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash

and it came back with a ...

#

... which just about caused me to fall off my chair.

This seems like a workable condition for the Flash Drive. I can see it on
YDL, on Mac OS X (and should be without X as well) and supposedly on
Windoze systems as well.


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