USB Flash Drive under Gentoo

[Gizmo]

Help!

I'm trying to get my 2.6 kernel to recognize my USB flash drive, and I'm having some problems.

Here's what I've got:

The kernel is compiled with support for USB devices. I have an entry in FSTab that looks like:

none, /proc/bus/usb, usbfs, defaults, 1, 1

If I understand this right, then when I attach and mount a usb device, I should have it show up at /proc/bus/usb, right? There's nothing there.

[Kaitain]

Type "dmesg" (without quotes) into a console right after plugging the usb mass storage device in and it should tell you where it is.

Linux has some trouble with laptops btw.

You'll find that if it's a USB1.1 device then the device will be something like /dev/sda1
If it's USB2 then it'll probably be /dev/uba
If it's on a laptop then give up and go with /dev/discs/disc1/part1 (or whatever the highest disc number on the system is).

If you're going grey very fast, then remember to compile the next kernel to include supermount-ng or similar.

[Gizmo]

Well, the device is /dev/sdc.

Unfortunately, I can't mount it. Linux doesn't seem to recognize the file system. It is a 256 Meg flash, and according to XP it is formatted as FAT, but neither

mount -t msdos /dev/sdc /mnt/usbstick

nor

mount -t vfat /dev/sdc /mnt/usbstick

work.

They all come back with
"Wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc, or too many mounted file systems."

[Gizmo]

Sigh. Duh. Case of the terminal stupids.

mount -t vfat /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usbstick

works great. Helps when you specify the partition to mount.

[Kaitain]

Linux's partition handling does suck quite spectacularly. If you ever try to mount a Zip disc, you need to mount partition 4 for some quite archane reasons...

[Aedan]

Some USB flash devices are partitioned, some arn't. There seems to be some variation to the specs as to how it's handled.