mark52230 Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 Trying to get my usb memory stick working in Mandrake 10 Community and was wondering if anyone had any ideas to help. So far I have got this: In the Mandrake control centre under hardware it says it's an unknown device but when configuring partitions it shows up as a different tab "sda" and is completely separate to "hda" so it's got to know its some storage device.. But when starting the partitions setup I get a load of errors which only happen when the stick is plugged in. Errors like: partitions sector #1919950958 (259GB) and sector #538989391 (666GB) are overlapping! and so on.. Plus the fact I don't know why it's quoting numbers like 259GB when the stick is only 128Mb! Help! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markwolfe Veteran Posted April 12, 2004 Veteran Share Posted April 12, 2004 The sda indicates it is (correctly) identified as a Serial Drive. hda is for normal (IDE) Hard Drives. You should be able to access the stick through /dev/sda1 (or whatever device it shows up under). However, it seems that your USB device may not be formatted correctly (or have a bad partiton table). It seems that the faults indicate some sort of mismatch in the drive configuration information. Perhaps Windows will disregard this, but it doesn't seem like Linux will. Of course, I may be wrong..... :unsure: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mark52230 Posted April 12, 2004 Author Share Posted April 12, 2004 Ok so say its got a bad partition table how do I get rid of the current partition table and create a new one? I'll backup the data from it now before I forget lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markwolfe Veteran Posted April 12, 2004 Veteran Share Posted April 12, 2004 Yes, backing up your data is a great first step. ;) After that, you can umount the drive and fsck it, to perform a File System ChecK... Or just reformat it. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mark52230 Posted April 12, 2004 Author Share Posted April 12, 2004 Hmm just 1 question before I do, how do I know what to umount? Because I don't see a folder anywhere with data in? Like my windows partition is /mnt/windows so if I wanted to unmount I'd usually do umount /mnt/windows? Lol or can I just do umount /dev/sda? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markwolfe Veteran Posted April 12, 2004 Veteran Share Posted April 12, 2004 If it isn't mounted, you should be able to fsck /dev/sda1, I think. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mark52230 Posted April 12, 2004 Author Share Posted April 12, 2004 Hmmm did I do this correctly?? [root@localhost obscure_]# fsck /dev/sda fsck 1.34 (25-Jul-2003) e2fsck 1.34 (25-Jul-2003) Couldn't find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks... fsck.ext2: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sda The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock: e2fsck -b 8193 <device> EDIT: Sorry I only read that last post after I posted mine. I did it for /dev/sda1 and got exactly the same thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markwolfe Veteran Posted April 12, 2004 Veteran Share Posted April 12, 2004 Perhaps fsck doesn't work on the filesystem on your USB device (FAT?). I haven't had a lot of FAT/NTFS exposure. Maybe plug it into a Windows machine and to a checkdisk on it... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mark52230 Posted April 12, 2004 Author Share Posted April 12, 2004 YEY!!! Got it working just one little thing.. When I plug it in am I supposed to umount it before pulling it back out again? If so then I'll have to change the fstab because it says only root can umount it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
supernova_00 Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 well what did you do to fix it? so that if other people search for this they can get there help without asking again...and for my personal knowlegde ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mark52230 Posted April 12, 2004 Author Share Posted April 12, 2004 Well I was just messing around with it at first and then I went into the partitions setup and deleted all the partitions.. According to mandrake I think there were about 5 or 6 partitions completely varying in size from 10Mb to something like 666Gb which I deleted. Once I'd deleted them it suddenly said the space left was 125Mb (correct) so I created a new partition (which it also auto detected as the max size being 125Mb) and formatted it as FAT32 (not FAT which it was) and it works.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
supernova_00 Posted April 12, 2004 Share Posted April 12, 2004 oh ok, makes sense Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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