[PLUG] USB mounting

Terry Griffin griffint at pobox.com
Wed Feb 2 16:42:43 UTC 2005


On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 07:45:23AM -0800, Bill Spears wrote:
> I need to mount a usb film reader on Fedora 3 system. Here's what we
> know:
> 1. Yesterday it worked automatically. When I plugged the USB cable into
> the computer, an icon appeared, much like a CDROM icon and I was able to
> access the media thru that. Today nothing.
> 2. I tried "mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 ~me/camera_film/" and it replied
> "mount: special device /dev/sda1 does not exist".  I also tried sdai for
> i=2...4.
> 
> What else can I try?
> -- 
> Bill Spears <bspears at easystreet.com>
> 

Some PCs have a chronic problem with this. One of my legacy computers
is an old 400Mz Celeron and it's real fussy about re-plugging in USB 
devices. It's definitly a hardware problem, maybe in the BIOS or in
the USB adapter. The only fix for that particular PC is to shut it down
and remove AC power to force the hardware to completely reinitialize. If
I just reboot, that's not enough. I've seen these sorts of problems less 
frequently in newer computers.

Watch your /var/log/messages file when you plug the device in. This
should give some clues. Sometimes the device will be assigned to /dev/sdb
(or some other /dev/sd*) instead of /dev/sda. If so this will be shown in 
/var/log/messages.

Terry



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