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Post subject: May have damaged USB stick trying to install sidux to it
 Posted: Nov 02, 2007 - 03:35 AM
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Joined: Oct 31, 2007
Posts: 11
Location: Brooklyn, NY, USA
Status: Offline
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| I used the sidux installer running off the live Eros preview cd to try to install to my USB stick. It's a Kingston 4GB DataTraveler. The installer quickly returned an error about not being able to format the drive right. Now the stick won't mount when I plug it in. It does show up in Gnome / System / Preferences / Hardware Information though. Does anybody know what to do to fix it? Thanks. |
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Post subject: RE: May have damaged USB stick trying to install sidux to it
Posted: Nov 02, 2007 - 05:32 AM
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Joined: Oct 31, 2007
Posts: 11
Location: Brooklyn, NY, USA
Status: Offline
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I tried googling for help. I did a dmesg and got this...
[ 335.673440] scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 PMAP PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
[ 335.943940] SCSI device sdc: 7823360 512-byte hdwr sectors (4006 MB)
[ 335.944563] sdc: Write Protect is off
[ 335.944567] sdc: Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[ 335.944569] sdc: assuming drive cache: write through
[ 335.946934] SCSI device sdc: 7823360 512-byte hdwr sectors (4006 MB)
[ 335.947558] sdc: Write Protect is off
[ 335.947562] sdc: Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[ 335.947564] sdc: assuming drive cache: write through
[ 335.947567] sdc: sdc1
[ 335.948326] sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sdc
[ 335.948369] sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[ 937.695790] cramfs: wrong magic
[ 937.697961] VFS: Can't find ext3 filesystem on dev sdc1.
[ 993.004173] FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
[ 993.004181] VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sdc1.
So it does seem to be messed up. Now I just have to figure out how to fix it. |
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Post subject: RE: May have damaged USB stick trying to install sidux to it
Posted: Nov 02, 2007 - 05:56 AM
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Joined: Nov 25, 2006
Posts: 530
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if it has failed in the middle then "something" gone wrong .
Sometimes the automatically formatting fails and the script cannot recover.
Please try to partition (reformat) with gparted for instance. |
_________________
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To dig a vineyard is worthier exercise for men.
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Post subject: RE: May have damaged USB stick trying to install sidux to it
Posted: Nov 09, 2007 - 04:42 PM
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Joined: Dec 02, 2006
Posts: 1905
Status: Offline
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| Or perhaps the flash mem on the stick going bad? That happens as flash has limited read/write cycles before it starts to fail. |
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Post subject:
Posted: Jan 27, 2008 - 10:47 PM
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Joined: Jan 27, 2008
Posts: 1
Status: Offline
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Something I have found that often helps with flaky flash drives is to zero them. First try zeroing just the first megabyte of the drive.
To do this use the "dd" command:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd? bs=1M count=1.
Substitute the correct letter for your drive for the "?" If this doesn't work, zero the whole drive (leave off the "count=1" ).
Then you wil need to repartition the drive, using gparted, cfdisk, or whatever utility you prefer, then format (mkfs) it.
If you get errors when zeroing the drive, or if it still won't format after zeroing, it's probably dead.
Even if the format goes without errors, I have found that flash drives will often have problems after a format if you don't zero at liest the first few kilobytes, especially if you are changing filesystems (FAT to ext2/3, for example. The automount will often pick up the remnants of the old filesystem and mount it as the old filesystem instead of the new. For some reason, this seems to happen more often with flash drives than with hard drives.
You don't want to zero the drive too often, as flash drives will fail after too many writes, but zeroing does often seem to revive a drive that doesn't want to format.
Note that zeroing the drive will destroy all data on it. This is not a data recovery technique, it is a hardware salvage technique. |
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Post subject:
Posted: Jan 28, 2008 - 02:22 PM
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Joined: Dec 28, 2007
Posts: 153
Status: Offline
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