USB pendrive not found in 214R full install

[Bruce B]

Have a good day's sleep.

Try the modprobe(s) above in /etc/rc.d/rc.local and see if you get better mileage.

Also, the U3 is Windows only stuff, some kind of partnership with MS. I deleted mine big time.

[Aitch]

Hi Bruce

I'm hoping you'll come back for an update
I've put the modprobe scripts in & I'm pleased to report that
I can now find my usb key - many thanks
I decided to test my other usb devices:-
a 4 port hub works Ok
my pendrive plugged into the 4 port hub works ok
& a dvdrw which works OK, either direct to PC usb or the hub
now for a peculiarity:-
I have 2 usb floppy drives,
1, an IBM
2. a Toshiba
Puppy now sees the IBM as 6 floppies when trying to detect with MUT & only fd3 will mount
Pmount can't find it at all!
The Toshiba is found just inserting it, but shows up as sda1
& it will mount if I put a floppy in!

If you, or anyone else can help unravel this, I'd be most appreciative

Also, Bruce, if you can tell me how you got rid of that damn U3 rubbish, because I've destroyed 3 drives trying to get puppy on
a usb keystick, & this one is unusable for that.
It is unbootable, can I make it, somehow?
I think I read somewhere that there's an onboard chip for the U3,
but I really don't know
I haven't tested the firewire bits because this is a friend's box & I'm intending putting this Puppy (214R) on my old IBM laptop
if this is successful

Thanks again for your help, sorry about the crossed wires when we started, I really do appreciate the folks who help on this forum
It is contributory as to why I like puppy more than other linuxes
The forum makes all the difference!!

Aitch

[rcrsn51]

@Aitch: Here are some things to try on your damaged flash drives.

1. Run Gparted and see if it can detect the drive. (You have to open the Devices list to check.) If so, delete any current partitions. Then create a new one as fat16 bootable.

2. Go here and download the 'pup2usb' package.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=16950
I have had good luck making flash drives bootable with GRUB.

[Aitch]

Hi, rcrsn51

Unfortunately neither of them shows up in Gparted, nor any other method
One of them was destroyed by my not being alert to windoze dislike of anything linux
I left the usb key plugged in whilst rebooting for some update,
went to make a cup of tea, & came back to find it running chkdsk,
& informing me it had found errors on my drive & corrected them
I was horrified when I spotted that it wasn't 'drive c'
but my pendrive, with my puppy files on which I was trying
to get working!!
It is still seen as a drive in windoze, but won't format,
I've tried TRK, - no fat details, but don't know what CHS values
to use to restore it to 1Gb
The other I inadvertantly pulled out without unloading it,
I think there must have been a power flashover or something
- it's been dead ever since
However, I emailed integral, & they've sent me instructions
to send it to them for test/replacement on their 'lifetime guarantee'
- we shall see
Ah, the wonders of modern electronics!!
Aitch
PS
When I get a new one or can un u3-i-fy my present one I'll retry 'puppy-on-a-stick'
edit
PPS
The 3rd one didn't get remembered because I don't have it anymore
It had a fast meeting with a wall in a red mist - oops!

[Jesse]

Hi,

Floppy disk drive /dev nodes fd0 - fd7 all refer to the same physical drive, if I recall correctly, and it is something like this, theres info on the net somewhere about it. The different fd number indicates a different layout of sectors/cylinders. I think fd0 indicates autodetect standard formats 1.4Mb, 720Kb etc... and other fd numbers indicate specific layout parameters.
Hope that helps.

Jesse

[Aitch]

Hi, jesse

Thanks
It helps me understand why the IBM shows up the way it does,
because they're probably stricter to the standard,
but doesn't help with the Toshiba showing up as sda1
My pendrive shows as sda1 as well!
Fortunately, I won't be using the Toshiba with my Laptop,
It's an IBM, and this is a friend's desktop I'm installing puppy on


Aitch

[Dougal]

What I've found is I can mount hard disk partitions, ram drives, temp filesystems, or whatever before X runs.

If you don't boot off usb media, then the usb-storage module is loaded from within /usr/sbin/delayedrun, started from xinitrc...

I recently added the "pfix=nox" boot option to 214R and to solve that problem I added to /etc/profile a line to run delayedrun if /tmp/bootcnt.txt exists...

[Dougal]

Aitch, I think I know what your problem is.
It seems like for a full install /tmp might not get cleaned out, so the flag I use to prevent the delayedrun script from running every time you start X prevents it from loading usb-storage.
Try this updated rc.sysin (just gunzip it and put it in /etc/rc.d) and see if it helps.

[Bruce B]

Dougal,

Thanks for the run-down, explanation and fix.

For many versions now I've modified /etc/profile as follows:

else
#want to go straight into X on bootup only...
if [ ! -f /tmp/bootcnt.txt ];then
touch /tmp/bootcnt.txt
# aplay -N /usr/share/audio/bark.au
dmesg > /tmp/bootkernel.log
# exec xwin
. /root/.bashrc
fi


The changes are no running of xwin and sourcing .bashrc

I was doing this before the recent versions, but am more determined to continue this on account of an irritation. The irritation being when I 'exit to the prompt', X restarts, then after that redundancy I can exit to the prompt.

It was on account of not running xwin when booting that I discovered that /dev/sda was not visible until after X ran.

In the course of these threads I inspected (read) xwin and .xinitrc and nothing caught my eye as to why /dev/sda wasn't accessible.


Bruce

[Bruce B]

Aitch,

About the U3 crap. You must accept my work to date as experimental. And the risk is yours. Just a standard disclaimer.

Here is an outline of the steps:

1) Open flash stick with cfdisk /dev/sda

Write down filesystem ID, cylinders, heads and sectors. The reason why is so you can put the stick back as it was.

close cfdisk

2) Wipe it clean (don't mount it)

dd if=/dev/zero of= /dev/sda bs=1M
or
dd if=/dev/zero of= /dev/sda bs=8192

second example will be a little slower, but likely to wipe clear to the end of the device or close to it.

3) Restore the partition

cfdisk -z -c xxx -h xxx -s xxx /dev/sda

where xxx is the interger value for the orginal cylinders, heads and sectors

when in cfdisk make one partition, make it bootable and mark it with the same filesystem ID as orginal. The ID is a hex value and you just enter the last two numbers.

Fat16 may be 0x06
Fat32 may be 0x0c or 0x0b
or even something else, just make it the same as original.

when satisfied write the changes and close cfdisk

4) Format it

Frankly, if I could format it from Windows or DOS I would. The reason why is DOS should be able to format a FAT16 for LFN support in Linux Mount utility.

You could also make it DOS bootable by using the format /s switch. This can't be done in Linux by easy way I'm aware of.

Also, having done things this way, DOS/Windows should be very happy reading and writing to the stick, as well as Linux.

-----------------

Notes on general partitioning rules:

• Linux partitioning doesn't use CHS
  DOS partitioning uses CHS
  Windows partitioning considers CHS, but doesn't necessarily use them.

Edit here: by using CHS, I mean Linux assigns CHS values but they may not be the actual CHS.

This is why I'd want to just put them back as the USB stick manufacture defined them, which can be done with Linux cfdisk.

And I'm not sure Flash sticks even have CHS except in a virtual way, but the partitioning utility will define them anyway.

[Bruce B]

Dougal,

I just read /usr/sbin/delayedrun and found it most interesting. There is a method to the madness.

The method (reasoning) is best explained in the comments. Much thanks.

Bruce

[davids45]

G'day H et al,

Just so H doesn't feel alone.....

I too have found that a full hard-drive install of 2.14R will not allow usb drives to be seen or mounted by MUT, Pmount and Pdrive but the LiveCD and a frugal install are OK on my desktops.
For the full install, ROX and other file managers see/list my usb flash/thumb drive as being present but I could not get these file managers to actually mount the thumb drive. An error message about fstab was the feedback from emelfm2 when I hit its 'mount' icon. On my full install of 2.14, fstab does not list the usb drives when I looked at it, just all the hard drive partitions.

I'll try Dougal's repair patch.

David S.

[Bruce B]

G'day H et al,

Just so H doesn't feel alone.....

I too have found that a full hard-drive install of 2.14R will not allow usb drives to be seen or mounted by MUT, Pmount and Pdrive but the LiveCD and a frugal install are OK on my desktops.
For the full install, ROX and other file managers see/list my usb flash/thumb drive as being present but I could not get these file managers to actually mount the thumb drive. An error message about fstab was the feedback from emelfm2 when I hit its 'mount' icon. On my full install of 2.14, fstab does not list the usb drives when I looked at it, just all the hard drive partitions.

I'll try Dougal's repair patch.

David S.

The reason why ROX, emelfm2 and other file managers don't mount like they otherwise could is because Puppy doesn't fill out fstab. The user must do this her own. But doing it is well worth it IMO.

[davids45]

G'day again,

As threatened, I tried Dougal's new rc.sysinit with two hard-drive installs of 2.14R that had not been able to see/mount USB thumb drives.
Both desk-tops running with full installs of 2.14R now can see and pre-mount the USB flash drive I tried them with.
So this problem looks 'solved' to me.
Well done Dougal, or should I say Doug-well.

David S.

[Aitch]

good one, davids45
glad some good came of it

however, dougal, if your still following
mine failed miserably
I unzipped your new rc.sysinit & saved my old one, fortunately,
because when I rebooted, it completely failed to load
reporting something about rc.sysinit cannot open
I've had to restore the original
Are you sure that file was intended for 214R, not 3.01?
Anyhow, I've now been able to see the other error message
"Intel chipset detected. However 915 resolution
was unable to determine the chipset type.
chipset ID:71248086
Please report the problem to stomIjen@<nospam>*Yahoo.com"
* My addition - nospam

I tried reporting it, but got a 'postmaster failed to deliver'
message
I don't know if that contributes, but sometimes I have to
restart x or reboot because of a black screen
Bruce
Thanks for the info about the pendrive
I'll follow up on that

Aitch

[Dougal]

The reason why ROX, emelfm2 and other file managers don't mount like they otherwise could is because Puppy doesn't fill out fstab. The user must do this her own. But doing it is well worth it IMO.

214R does use fstab.
Hotpup keeps it updated and the mou8nting is done via Rox.

[Dougal]

mine failed miserably
I unzipped your new rc.sysinit & saved my old one, fortunately,
because when I rebooted, it completely failed to load
reporting something about rc.sysinit cannot open
I've had to restore the original
Are you sure that file was intended for 214R, not 3.01?

That's odd. It's definitely meant for 214R, since that's what I use. Also Tempestuous and Davids45 used it successfully.

Could it be that it wasn't executable? (was it green in Rox after you gunzipped it?)

Anyhow, I've now been able to see the other error message
"Intel chipset detected. However 915 resolution
was unable to determine the chipset type.
chipset ID:71248086
Please report the problem to stomIjen@<nospam>*Yahoo.com"

That's irrelevant -- it's just 915resolution being run when it's not applicable (if your Intel video is too old or if you don't have one, but /etc/resolutionfix exists from running on a previous machine).