[PLUG] Transfer from thumb drive to Windows computer

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 6 May 2006 12:49:35 -0700 (PDT)
stupendoussteve at gmail.com dijo:

> > But y'all know that GUI stuff lies a lot. All real truth is revealed
> > from the command line, right? Is there a command line way to tell what
> > the file on the thumb drive really is? A genuine copy of the file or a
> > link?

> ls -l would show you if it were a link. Instead of the normal file name,
> it would be something like foo.pdf -> /home/blah/foo.pdf.
> 
> Look through dmesg when you insert the usb drive to see what the device
> node for the drive is, it should be something like /dev/sda. To check for
> partitions run fdisk -l /dev/sda and it'll tell you what's on it.

OK, those commands seem to give some answers:

--------------------------------------------------------
[39002.211815] usb 3-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and
address 4 [39002.554070] Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
[39002.561294] scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[39002.563742] usb-storage: device found at 4
[39002.563750] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[39002.564045] usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
[39002.564053] USB Mass Storage support registered.
[39007.565385]   Vendor: SanDisk   Model: Cruzer Micro      Rev: 0.2
[39007.565404]   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI
revision: 02 [39007.573203] usb-storage: device scan complete
[39007.685683] SCSI device sda: 1000944 512-byte hdwr sectors (512 MB)
[39007.686558] sda: Write Protect is off
[39007.686566] sda: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
[39007.686573] sda: assuming drive cache: write through
[39007.690809] SCSI device sda: 1000944 512-byte hdwr sectors (512 MB)
[39007.691684] sda: Write Protect is off
[39007.691692] sda: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
[39007.691698] sda: assuming drive cache: write through
[39007.691706]  /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1
[39007.695699] Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id
0, lun 0 jjj at Devil5:/media/thumbdrive$ fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 512 MB, 512483328 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 993 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1         992      499851+   b  W95 FAT32
jjj at Devil5:/media/thumbdrive$ ls -l
total 24
-rw-rw-rw-  1 jjj jjj 22627 2006-05-05 15:17 Runes.pdf
jjj at Devil5:/media/thumbdrive$
------------------------------------------------------------------

So it appears it is just exactly as I thought -- it is FAT32, formatted
as one partition, and there is one file on that partition, Runes.pdf,
no directories or anything else. And especially, no file named
reglog.txt. And Runes.pdf is the file, not a link to the file.

But I have just discovered something else. The file reglog.txt is on my
Windows 2000 desktop. There is a copy in c:\documents and settings\john
\recent documents ... (I didn't scroll all the way out to see how deep
Microsoft buried it), and there is another identical copy in g:\. What
is interesting is that the G drive is a USB 2.0 drive hanging
permanently on the Windows 2000 desktop that I use for backups.

So how did this file get onto the thumb drive? And why can Linux not
see it? And I know it has to be on the thumb drive because that is what
the computer at PSU saw on the thumb drive, and I even opened it there
with Notepad, and the contents were identical to what I just pasted
below from the reglog.txt files on my Windows 2000 desktop:

-----------------------------------------------------
The time is Mon Oct 31 07:30:43.156 2005

<MacBuddy><ClientVersion>iPod for Windows
5.0.0.35</ClientVersion><CustomerInfo><Address><FirstName>John</FirstName><KanjiFirstName></KanjiFirstName><LastName>Jason</LastName><KanjiLastName></KanjiLastName><Company></Company><StreetAddr1></StreetAddr1><StreetAddr2></StreetAddr2><ExistingEmailAddress>jxj at hotpop.com</ExistingEmailAddress><City></City><StateProv></StateProv><ZipPostal></ZipPostal><Country>840</Country><IntlPhoneNumber></IntlPhoneNumber></Address><RegistrationInfo><Occupation></Occupation><Location></Location><AppleSpam>NO</AppleSpam><OthersSpam>NO</OthersSpam><LanguagePreference></LanguagePreference></RegistrationInfo></CustomerInfo><MachineInfo><MacOSVersion>WINDOWS2K</MacOSVersion><SerialNumber>4u50612fsaz</SerialNumber><MachineTypeName>0</MachineTypeName></MachineInfo></MacBuddy>
------------------------------------------------------

This is not making any sense at all. What eldritch stuff did Microsoft
do here?