Good afternoon all, I've been travelling these forums a lot trying to solve my problem of my USB key not being accessible for saving config or for setting persistent home directories. Wasn't able to find much in the way of answers, so I started messing around on my own.

I used fdisk /dev/sda in Knoppix shell and found that there were indeed four partitions on my measly 32mb Sony Microvault. For some reason none of the partitions were accessible though without a significant amount of tweaking. I went ahead and deleted all 4 of the partitions on my key and verified that they were indeed gone.

Next I simply plugged the key into my Windows XP box (gotta keep one around for Visual Studio work) and formatted the drive as FAT16 (for some reason when Sony ships them they are formatted FAT12, which is quite useless)

I then went back to my Knoppix machine and plugged in the key and the icon automatically appeared on my desktop as a mount to /dev/sda1. I am now able to save my config as well as create a persistent home dir on the key. I have since tried this same technique on a number of different keys I was having problems with, every one works like a charm.

Hope that helps.

Wally Lawless
http://www.power-coder.com