curious about mounting flash device

English Multimedia
1

I’m trying to use the most-base install of opensuse 11.4 and so i’m using the text-only interface. I looked up some guides on using the ‘mount’ command but I’m encountering problems. I tried doing…

mkdir /tmp/flash
su
mount /dev/sdb /tmp/flash

but first off, I don’t even know if sdb is my flash device, there’s ~60 things in my /dev/ directory, and ~10 things that look like ‘sdb’

but I try anyway, and I generally get an error telling me that either /dev/sdb is busy, or /tmp/flash is busy but I wanted to check here and clarify first, how do I even know which /dev/ item is my flash drive? When I plug in my flash drive, no less than 3 new entries appear in /dev/ so, I’m a little confused. What do I do?

2

Hi,

Plug your device and type this command to know wich device it is :

grep -Ff <(hwinfo --disk --short) <(hwinfo --usb --short)
3

u_u

so my usb device just…stopped working, or windows just gave up on running it
(running linux from virtual box, which was working fine and passing usb data a moment ago) and now windows won’t recognize it as a device to pass the data to the virtual machine…

BUT, I did discovered from the YaST tool that in my “System Services (Run Level)” I found an auto-mounting service (autofs) and I enabled it to run in runlevel 5, I switched to runlevel 5 and kept on connecting usb devices (while they were still working) and…no dice, and I saw that /dev/ was being updated, so linux could see a new device was attached, it just wasn’t auto mounting for some reason…any ideas?

4

OK! some progress, I tried the grep command, worked like a charm on my home computer. I don’t know what sg0 and sg1 are, but sdb seems to be my flash drive.

now my problem is that I’m getting an error:

mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /tmp/flash
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful into is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

as far as I know the flashdrive(this is different from the one I was using earlier -this one has never failed me) works fine, it automounts in windows, opensuse 11.4 KDE, OS X, etc, etc etc so I don’t know why the mount command doesn’t seem to like it.

I’m still interested in autofs as a service is anyone has any ideas how to kick that off correctly…I enabled it but it doesn’t seem to be working.

5

I suggest that, instead of the command given, you try: fdisk -l
to determine what is the flash drive. You might still find that it is “/dev/sdb”, but it may turn out that it is partitioned and that you should be mounting “/dev/sdb1”.

6

Are you sure that the Flash drive is formated in FAT. The error seems to say that it is not.

Try fdisk -l with device connected.

7

I’m king moron.

I was trying to mount sdb, I should have been trying to mount sdb1.

ugh, it took me all day to figure that out. ALL. DAY. I’m the worst.

Thanks for the help though! fdisk -l is a life saver.