[wellylug] (OT) Solaris 2.5

[Andrew]

OK, let's try this again, sent it using the wrong email address and
got rejected.

I'm having troubles with getting by USB flash drive thing to work with
Linux 2.6.9. 

With 2.6.3 it worked fine. Plug it in, syslog says something to the
effect of 'found usb device, putting it on /dev/sda', then you could
mount /dev/sda as one would expect. 

But with 2.6.9 it was a different story. Syslog would say something
about trying to put it on /dev/ub, got confused, couldn't find the
device, and gave up.  I haven't actually found anything specifically
addressing this problem, apart from vague references to udev, but I
thought 'udev supposedly creates devices, maybe that's the answer. So
I did an 'apt-get install udev'. Now look what happens when I plug it in: 

Dec 16 15:02:49 portia kernel: usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using address 2
Dec 16 15:02:49 portia kernel: ub: sizeof ub_scsi_cmd 60 ub_dev 940
Dec 16 15:02:49 portia kernel: uba: device 2 capacity nsec 50 bsize 512
Dec 16 15:02:49 portia kernel: uba: was not changed
Dec 16 15:02:49 portia kernel:  uba: unknown partition table
Dec 16 15:02:49 portia kernel: usbcore: registered new driver ub

so far so good, but that unknown partition table doesn't look so
flash. I vaguely recall something of the sort with the old kernel, but
I could be wrong.

Anyway, look what happens when I mount it: 

Dec 16 15:02:49 portia udev[4307]: creating device node '/dev/uba'
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: uba: was not changed
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: uba: was not changed
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: uba: rw=0, want=502, limit=50
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: FAT: Directory bread(block 501) failed
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: uba: rw=0, want=503, limit=50
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: FAT: Directory bread(block 502) failed
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: uba: rw=0, want=504, limit=50
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: FAT: Directory bread(block 503) failed
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: uba: rw=0, want=505, limit=50
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: FAT: Directory bread(block 504) failed
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device
Dec 16 15:04:56 portia kernel: uba: rw=0, want=506, limit=50

eek! FAT errors!  those errors keep on going for a while, this is just
the first bit.  the directory I mounted it on seems to be blank, and
you can't create a file without getting a 'r/w error'. 

I'm happy to report that this doesn't seem to actually do anything bad
to the usb key, everything looks fine in Windows. 

Any clues? 

I also get the impression that there's something I'm missing from my
reading material. I keep running into problems after upgrading
kernels, and look on the web and it's all 'oh, you need to install the
new modutils for it to work' or whatever. Surely there must be a
better way of finding this sort of thing out than putting error
messages into Google.

-- 
--
|Andrew Tarr | arc at stuff.gen.nz	|  http://arc.stuff.gen.nz
|GPG Public Key:- http://arc.stuff.gen.nz/andrew.gpg
|_____
"There is no excellent beauty that hath not 
some strangeness in the proportions" 
--Francis Bacon
|~~~~~
|