I have a 256mb usb flash pen which don't seem to work with linux distro mandrake 10.1 on my patriot laptop with intel celeron processor 1.2Ghz

Basically I put the pen in the usb port before truning on the laptop and it will load up the BIOS setting but before it reaches the OS option boot screen (lilo) it just sits there doing nothing.

Then when i take it out and put it in when its at the loading screen for loading an mounting the different drivers an file system it does not seem to even detect it when searching for new hard ware.. is there anyway i can mount it in terminal if so help me out please

make a dir to mount it in (/mnt/usb) and from the terminal mount it like this:

$ mount /dev/sda1 -t vfat /mnt/usb

if that works, you're ready to add it to your fstab

fstab how do i hadd it to my usb? an what does the ampersand meand i.e "$" and what dose the "-t" mean as well

whats the difference between "mount" and "supermount"

$ serves to represent the command prompt as a normal user which reminds me that you may need to be root to mount so firts you'll have to do:

$ su

after which you'll be asked the root password

the promt will then change to #

-t is a flag used to indicate you're going to give the file system type (which probably is fat so in linux yuo'll need to say vfat)

To add your usb to fstab again you'll need to be root (at the console so if you exited do 'su' again - which mean super user)

then type

# emacs /etc/fstab

and add the line:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/usb auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

and save and exit.

rite i have managed to mount the usb in /mnt/USB but only problem is that i cannot seem to access it using GUI in konqueror but can access it using root in the terminal and see all the listed files when i dir the folder
any ideas how i can access the pen as a normal user i tryed using the chown command but have had no joy

You are kidding, right?
1. "$" sign as well as "#" sign stand for BASH
Practically, meaning that you open your console (terminal) and type configuration.
2. About "-t" in mount command, again simply open terminal and type
#man mount
3. you can edit your fstab with text editor whichever you like. there are hundreds of them.
Take Nano as an example:
#nano -w /etc/fstab

The reason that you cannot access the pendrive is because it was mounted as root, while the GUI you are running is just your normal user.
In the fstab entry, try changing "user" to "users" so that any user may interact with the pendrive. You may also want to look into having a sudo command set up to mount the usb pendrive.
In the sudoers file, which you have to edit via visudo you could have this ...
Where users is the group that you want to give access to, ALL is kind of like the location; if you put localhost, it would only allow people to do it who are logged in locally, which might be a better idea

Try to go easy on those new to Linux or *nix in general. Everyone learns these things at one time or another and we shouldn't make people scared to ask such questions in the future. This is a newbie friendly site, lets keep it that way in more polite responses to educate those that don't know the simple things.

Regards.

My apologies if I was insulting. Didn't mean that

2 animan
The reason that you cannot access the pendrive is because it was mounted as root, while the GUI you are running is just your normal user.
In the fstab entry, try changing "user" to "users" so that any user may interact with the pendrive.
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hey thanks alot for that worked like a charm soon as i change user to users and supermount to just mount thanks alot only thing i dont understamd was the extra command you put at the bottom ...


anyhow just another question does anyone know how i can scan for a new device thats been pluged in via usb without having to going to Drakconf control center? by just doing it in terminal , i am using mandrake 10.1

I have Fedora Core 3 and a similar problem. when I plug my compactflash card into the reader it automatically mounts it to /media/usbdisk BUT if I browse it - nothing is there. Not until I manually
$mount /dev/sda1 /media/usbdisk
then I can browse it. How do I get it browseable without manually mounting it?

The reason for this is I have the reader on a server machine and want windows machines to be able to browse to it.

hmm seems like this thing got issues when i remove the usb pen an plug it back it it worked fine but soon as i change the usb port that i orignally and normally plug it into it just went back to the same old problem of not been about to mount it as a normal user this is the configureation of my fstab file

/dev/hda6 / ext3 noatime 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda7 /home ext2 noatime 1 2
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto user,unhide,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/windows vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0
//juillette-pc/xpfiles /mnt/xpfiles smbfs user,credentials=/etc/samba/auth.juillette-pc.nick,sync 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usb auto rw,users,auto 0 0

I think if its in a different port, it may change to sdb and so on. To fix this I guess you could unload/reload the usb modules
# rmmod usb-storage
# modprobe usb-storage
although that might be unneccessary and/or a pain in the but to do every time. You may also want to put the modprobe/rmmod things in your sudoers file.

First step, if you haven't already, add it to the /etc/fstab file, using the line:

then, all you need to do to mount it manually is type
Are you using Konqueror (KDE)? If so, then access it through the devices menu in the tree, usually at the left hand side of the window. This will mount it automatically.

Hope this is of some use.