Hi Folks,
I suspect I've done somthing foolish (OK, maybe several things).
Yesterday, browsing round Tesco, I spotted 1GB USB sticks on sale for £9.97. Looked like a bargain, so I bought one. OK, maybe a gamble, but at low stakes.
Branded "TESCO / TECHNIKA", "Manufactured in Taiwan for Tesco Stores Ltd."; the info on the front of the pack is in English, on the back in Polish, Czeck, Hungarian and Slovak.
After I got home, I gave it a whirl by plugging it in, mounting /dev/sda1 (which is where my USB sticks go) onto /flash (my mount point for this kind of thing), made a directory /Ted on it, and squirted about 300MB at it from one of my "junkbox" directories (which also has a few sub-directories of junk), using
cp -a 00_junk /flash/Ted
(Maybe "-a" was a mistake).
Lots of messages up on the console about not being able to set permissions (OK, expected, since it wouldn't be a Linux file system).
Then, after a bit a lot of messages "bad FAT"!
Also, at the same time, lots of complaints about multibyte names (which I don't have). A couple of messages about Interrupt from USB.
Hmmm. Multi bite, bad fat ... Obesity???
Finally it was done. I could read from whatever had gone in immediately under /flash/Ted, and the sub-directories were there, but if I changed into one of these I couldn't read anything in there.
Clearly a bit of a mess. So I deceided to delete everything and think again. Deleting top-level stuff OK, but the sub-directories wouldn't play.
Finally decided to start from scratch. Started fdisk on it, blew away all the partitions, planted a new Linux one (type 83), and tried to mkfs an ext2 filesystem on it. Got message that the kernel couldn't make head nor tail of it, and would continue using its stored FAT (previous version) untile the next reboot. Well the previous FAT was no good by now, so I re-booted.
Well, you've guessed it -- the thing is now totally useless. Can't do a thing with it! It won't mount on /dev/sda1 of course, since there's no filesystem.
So, to come to the point:
1. I'd be interested in any suggestions and expertise about how to set up a Linus partition on a zapped/blank [which?] USB drive. This would presumably involve addressing some /dev/usb*** just as one would for /dev/hda, say, if doing the like for a standard HDD.
No big deal if you can't be bothered -- it was only a tenner, so I'll just have to fine myself 4 pints of beer.
2. Also interested in any suggestions about whether I should have bought it in the first place (with implications about possibly ever buying another one).
With thanks, and happy weekend to all. Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 18-Aug-07 Time: 08:41:43 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------