[PLUG] USB flash drive issues

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Wed Sep 26 22:40:00 UTC 2018


   These issues are out of my knowledge base on USB flash drives and I
need someone to explain some unusual behavior to me, or point me to docs
that explain mounting removable media.

   Setting up my new desktop I need to copy config files from the existing
server/workstation to the new one, and I'm using USB flash drives for this.

   One drive I used was recognized by both systems as /dev/sdc. A different
drive (a 32G Sundisk) was seen by the existing host as /dev/sdb1 (which is
in fstab as: /dev/sdb1   /mnt/thumb  vfat  auto,users,rw  0   0)

   The new host sees it as sdc/sdc1, so I made a mount point /mnt/flash/ and
entered it in /etc/fstab as: /dev/sdc1   /mnt/flash   vfat   auto,users.rw 0
0).

   When I try to mount /mnt/flash the system tells me only root can mount it.
This is one aspect I don't understand.

   When root tries to '/mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/flash' the system tells me it's
the wrong filesystem type -- not vfat -- and it cannot find the superblock.
This is another aspect I don't understand.

   Both hosts run the same distribution: Slackware-14.2.

   What should I read to learn why the kernel in the new system is giving me
such a hard time with both this SunDisk flash drive and another one when the
other desktop has no issues with either.

TIA,

Rich



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