USB Pen Drive Crisis

[John Thompson]

On Mon, 08 Mar 2004 09:33:22 +0000

Adam Cooper <adam.cooper at port.ac.uk> wrote:


> Funnily enough my MP3 Player/USB Drive has started to do this whereas
> it worked before. (Before being, before I installed kernel 2.6 from
> Aranjv).
> 
> It's definitely not the device since it plays music fine and mounts on
> windows boxes.
> 
> Are there any fixes for this?

Are you perhaps using hotplug to load the usb-storage modules?  I've
found that unless devices are mounted using device labels (as opposed to
using the device file in /dev itself), hotplug will not release the
device after you umount it, meaning if you mounted the drive using, say,
/dev/sdg1, the next time you'd have to use /dev/sdh1, and the time after
that /dev/sdi1, and so on. The real why to fix this would be to put a
device label on the drive, but I can only find a way to do this with
ext2/3 filesystems using e2label or tune2fs.  Since all my memory sticks
are vfat format for "lowest common denominator" compatibility, this
doesn't really help me.

My work-around has been to remove hotplug from my system, and use the
"usbmgr" tool instead (http://www.dotAster.com/~shuu/linux/usbmgr/)


-- 

-John (JohnThompson at new.rr.com)