USB Flash stick

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

At 06:28 5/17/2004, Chadley Wilson wrote:
>Just a question, Why is it that my flash stick formatted fat32 works on
>all linux and Winoze systems, but no-one else's flash sticks will work.

Not guaranteed to be true, but I think it's correct:

Some manufacturers are lazy/bored/cheap/whatever and do not create a 
partition table on such disks, just the vfat filesystem. Windows is either 
sloppy enough or smart enough (pick your point of view) to see that and not 
care, and it reads the filesystem without having a partition table. Linux 
is stricter and barfs. So create a new partition table in Linux, and 
create+format a filesystem, then both Linux and Windows should be able to 
read it well.

>mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device

This is IIRC why some disks/sticks won't accept /dev/sda1... there *is no* 
/dev/sda1. There is only /dev/sda, the whole device, there are no partitions.

FWIW, on the few disks I have, I immediately created a new partition table, 
a new vfat partiiton/filesystem, and formatted it. Haven't had a single 
problem yet. All disks work well, although of course I've tested a few not 
hundreds.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,


-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz at simpaticus.com
http://www.simpaticus.com