USB flash drive not able to mount.

[bokaroseani]

Hi,

I am using Knoppix 4.02 live CD on IBM thinkpad T20. When I plug my USB flash memory (128MB) to my laptop, it shows up on the desktop as sda1. But when I try to mount it by right clicking on it and selecting "mount", it gives me an error message "mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified."

How do I use this USB flash drive to create a persistent disk image? Any help?

[bokaroseani]

How do I figure out what filesystem my USB flash drive is?

I also used the following code: "dmesg | tail". I get the following output:

SCSI device sda: 253888 512-byte hdwr sectors (130 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 02 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
sda: sda1
Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
usb-storage: device scan complete
NTFS-fs error (device sda1): read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Primary boot sector is invalid
NTFS-fs error (device sda1): read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Mount option errors=recover not used. Aborting without trying to recover.
NTFS-fs error (device sda1): ntfs_fill_super(): Not an NTFS volume.
[/list]

[Markus]

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda should tell the formatting. I don't know why you get ntfs errors since it should be fat formatted instead of ntfs.

You can try manually mounting with:
sudo su
mkdir /mnt/sda1 if it doesn't exist yet
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 assuming fdisk said fat32

man mount will give some options on mounting.

[bokaroseani]

Thanks. Those commands worked. My filesystem was fat16 I found.

One problem still remains. When I try to create a persistent disk image, the choices of partitions for creating the image doesnt include the USB flash. It only asks me to choose between my two hard disk partitions. Would anyone know how to have the USB flash drive also listed as one of the choices. I can see the sda1 partition is mounted and I can read files from there. Why then am I not able to create the persistent disk image on it?

[bokaroseani]

Hi,

I am wondering if I can save a persistent disk image on one of my hard drive partitions and then save the image file to my usb flash drive to use it to boot next time. Is that ok to do this on ntfs format hard drive? I couldnt find any troubleshooting as to how to make a persistent disk image directly on the usb drive. Can anyone help?

[Markus]

For booting from a disk image have a look at http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11796
Don't know much about using any persistent images on usb. Tried the Documentation/Bugs/Search?

[bokaroseani]

Thanks Markus, I looked through the forum thread you mention. Also looked through the documentation of the bugs in Knoppix 4.0.2. Nowhere do they say anything about why the USB is not showing on the list of partitions where a persistent disk image (PDI) can be created.

Is there a way I can reformat my USB flash drive in ext3 file system? Maybe that way, it will show up on the list of partitions where Knoppix can create a PDI. Anyway, I can give it a try but I dont know how to reformat the USB flash drive in ext3. Also, I am wondering if I reformat it in ext3, will I be able to use the flash drive on systems running Win XP?

[Markus]

Well, formatting is easy, mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1 but XP won't see it afterwards. If the drive is large enough you could perhaps split it to two partitions, sda1 with fat32 and sda2 with ext3.