USB not recognized (n00b)

[garbageman14]

I just installed Knoppix 3.7 and have been futsing with it (with much help from this forum), but I seem to be having a big problem with my USB devices. Specifically, I have a Maxtor One-Touch 120GB drive that isn't being recognized. It's on all during bootup, and there are messages about Knoppix scanning for USB ports and finding them, but the scan (I forget the command off the top of my head) finds nothing on my USB ports (incl. my scanner and printer). I'm a complete n00b, and am really kind of clueless about what's going on here. Thanks in advance for your help on this.

[phraitz]

first of all u have to create a directory in /mnt

just run in a terminal as root

mkdir usbhdd

after that you can mount ur harddisk

normally it should be on /dev/sda1 (since knoppix 3.7 it is on /dev/uba1 . i dont know why,but just try both)

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbhdd

cd /mnt/usb

now u should be able to write on ur hdd

[garbageman14]

Ok. So I tried just mounting it like you said and couldn't get it to work. So I looked at my fstab and there was nothing about it. So I added a line. Here's my fstab:

/dev/hda3 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /floppy vfat defaults,user,noauto,showexec,umask=022 0 0
usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /cdrom iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noexec,noauto 0 0
/dev/cdaudio /cdaudio iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noexec,noauto 0 0
/dev/sda1 mnt/sda1 auto rw,user,exec,sync
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 ext3 noauto,users,exec 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda4 none swap defaults 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda5 none swap defaults 0 0

But it still won't mount. What am I doing wrong?

[garbageman14]

Anybody? I managed to figure out that it's "usbfs" and not "usbDEVfs" and I altered any instances I found in fstab and mtab, but it's still not recognizing my drive.

[garbageman14]

Nobody has anything? Am I supposed to put a pci=noapci tag in lilo.conf somewhere? If so where? Can someone please help me, this is getting really frustrating.

[Crusader]

But the drive ISN'T usbfs, it's whatever file system your drive was formatted with.
That could be one problem.
You can also force mounting by logging in as root and trying
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
or
mount -t vfat /dev/uda1 /mnt/sda1
(to phraitz: that's a side effect of switching from the dev file system to udev, a new feature of the 2.6 Linux kernels)
the vfat option assumes your Maxtor drive was formatted as FAT or FAT32 in Windows. If it was formatted as NTFS you'll need to use Captive-NTFS or reformat the drive, because Linux has serious issues.

I notice that your modified fstab has /dev/sda1 mnt/sda1 auto rw,user,exec,sync
there should be a / before mnt -> /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

There's a program in the Utilities menu (second set of menus, just to be irritating) called USBview. Does that have any device that looks like your Maxtor hard disk? It should have Maxtor somewhere in the listing of a plugged in device. If not, your drive isn't being detected correctly after boot.

[phraitz]

couldn't be that u find the usb mass storages on kernel 2.6.9 and higher in /dev/ubaX?

since knoppix 3.7(with kernel 2.6.9) my usb stick is located at /dev/uba1

i read in a german forum that they have changed the handling of usb drives , so that they aren't anymore scsi emulated