Other Help Topics :: USB Not Recognised

Hey all,

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here - I've burned the installation image to CD and booted up off of it. My objective is to put the distribution onto a USB Flash Drive and boot off of that. So I'm running "dslinstall" and selecting the USB HDD option.

Here's the problem - When the script tries to mount the Flash Drive (/dev/sda1), it returns "/dev/sda1 is not a valid block device". When I try and mount it myself I get the same error. I can see the drive properly under windows (it has a single FAT partition right now) and I've been experimenting with FlashLinux on the same drive before now, so I know it works.

I'm wondering if maybe I don't have some module I need to access the Flash Drive. I'd be grateful for any help anyone can give me.

Edit - I've got Red Hat Enterprise on the same box, so I booted into that to see if the Flash Drive works there. It does. So there's definitely something in DSL that's not picking it up.

In my experiences I have found that sometimes the first time it is recognized as sda. When you first boot up run in a shell 'cat /etc/fstab' and take note of the drives. Then plug in your flash drive and wait about 20 seconds for it to recognize it and run 'cat /etc/fstab' again and take note of the difference, this should be your usb drive. If it says sda instead of sda1, I have found that I needed to unplug the drive, wait and than plug it in again wait about 20 seconds for it to recognize and 'cat /etc/fstab' and than I usually see that it is recognized as sda1 and I can use it normally.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for getting back to me!

The problem is that there's no difference in /etc/fstab regardless. If I look at the fstab (with the Flash Drive in), remove the drive and look at it again, then replace the drive, there's no difference to the fstab at all.

If I manually add the relevant line to the fstab ("/dev/sda /mnt/usb vfat noauto,users,exec 0 0"), then try to mount the drive ("mount /mnt/usb") I get the "/dev/sda is not a valid block device" error again...

original here.