Hi all

[remus]

I'm showing a friend tinycore linux, and encountered some strange problems.

he is using his own imation flash drive, to store tce folder

during boot up we get a ton of the following on screen

Code: [Select]

hub 1-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 2
The flash drive is not being detected.
I'm trying to boot with tinycore waitusb=20 with no effect

Once the machine is booted, I can add my own usb flash drives to the machine and it detects the drivers ok. Once the machine is booted, it still does not detect my friends flash drive.

We have even tried formating the flash drive on a windows xp machine to fat32, then copied back his tce folder, with no effect.

My friend had a spare flash drive which is a kingston which is working fine

any ideas ?

[curaga]

Faulty usb drive

If unplugging and replugging doesn't help, IMHO I would warranty it.

[beerstein]

Hi: I just posted similar problems while using an SD card in an ATA adaptor.
a possible direction you might take is checking on the following:

MBR (master boot record)
boot sector
partition table (msdos, sun, loop, pc98,bsd,dvh,gpt ...) thess are some options for the pt
flag ( boot, etc)
fstab
partition boundries (in some cases a partition must end and start at acertain cylinder)

I am still fighting with problems that may be related to the items mentioned
above.

[remus]

You know what ?

My friend had just used that flash drive to install a live cd of ubuntu to play with.
Perhaps its got something to do with the mbr that would have been created onto that drive.

He has now tried all sorts of 3rd party programs for formating a flash drive in windows.

I'll ask him to use fdisk in linux to remove the partitions on the drive then use fdisk to recreate them.

I think you can also format fat32 in linux with mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1 , i'll ask him to try.

[beerstein]

after several hours of unsuccessful work I used another computer with built in SD card slot to partition and format.
In this case the system sees the memory as an SD card in the first place.
But I still was not sure how to set the flags and the partition table type.
I need to study this more and will post.

[remus]

Hey beerstein,

I just had a quick look on google, seems like formating a sd card in windows xp is the same as for a floppy or a flash drive.

1. insert sd card
2. open my computer (win xp)
3. right click on sd card icon
4. select format , or perhaps reformat option, and follow the prompts.

In the past I had a usb flash drive I had Ping Is Not Ghost(http://ping.windowsdream.com/) booting from. to make it easy to deploy win xp via sysprep to computers without optical drives.

Once I was done with the image deployment, I formated the usb drive in windows xp so I could use it for something else. I discovered that windows would no longer auto open the drive when I inserted it. I tried it in linux and could not open the drive at all.
using the linux command

Code: [Select]

fdisk -l /dev/sda to look at the partition info on the drive would results in a list of 9 primary partitions on the drive... Which should not be possible. So I tried all number of 3rd party usb drive formating tools in windows that did not fix the problem. I think because they do not REMOVE the partition on a flash drive, only format them...

I booted up a linux live rescue CD and did the following.

fdisk /dev/sda

- deleted partitions
- created new partition
- partition type fat32
- write changes

I then attatched the drive to a win xp machine and formated the drive as fat32, and its worked ever since.

I only just found out that I can format fat32 in linux with

Code: [Select]

mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1 or

Code: [Select]

mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1 so I could have done the whole job in one os.

[remus]

errrr what ?
Me thinks off topic