Error reading pen drive

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2010-08-18 at 16:10 -0500, Aaron Konstam wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-08-18 at 11:28 -0500, Mikkel wrote:
> > On 08/18/2010 08:57 AM, Parshwa Murdia wrote:
> > > 
> > > Disk /dev/sdb: 33.5 GB, 33554432000 bytes
> > > 64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 32000 cylinders
> > > Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes
> > > Disk identifier: 0x00000000
> > > 
> > >    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> > > 
> > > I don't but I guess the drive is having a small sector corrupted
> > > inside it as the icon is getting displayed but other actions have been
> > > restricted unknowingly!
> > Of hand, it looks like you did something like "mke2fs /dev/sdb".
> > While this is valid, it creates a drive without a partition table.
> > This causes problems for the auto-mount software.
> > 
> > While you could manually mount a drive set up this way, you are
> > better using parted to create a partition table, a partition that
> > spans the entire drive, and formatting it. You will probably find
> > that one of the GUIs for parted is easier to use. You may have
> > gparted or qtparted installed.
> > 
> > Mikkel
> 
> I find pen drives work much better if they a re partitioned as windows
> devices, even on fedora.

It's also a practical necessity when you're interested in portability. I
copy lots of large video files to my 8GB Kingston because I can just
plug it into my DVD player -- which only groks VFAT -- and watch them on
by plasma TV (some day I hope to spring for one of those network media
switch boxes and save myself the hassle :-).

However I do see an occasional problem: after a week or two of heavy use
you can suddenly find that copying a file will just sit there for many
hours with the pendrive light blinking (iotop shows it copying a few
bytes at a time, or none). The only fix is to completely reformat the
drive. I don't know if this is a problem with the flash memory's
peculiar mode of operation, with the Kingston model in particular, or
with VFAT fragmentation, but it's a pain when it happens.

IOW, be very careful using these things for important data, and always
keep a backup on your HD.

poc