I bought myself a 64MB "Pocket Disk" USB compact flash `disk drive'.
It says it's supported under Linux (2.4.0 or above), but doesn't give
details.
Executive summary: works fine.
Geek summary: mount /dev/sda1 -t vfat /mnt/tmp. (And, don't play
with new geek toys on 2 hours of sleep.)
In section 3.3 in the installation manual, it says:
"For Mac OS and Linux
It is very easy and simple for these two operating systems. Just plug
in the Pocket Disk into the USB port and it will be automatically
detected by the computer. No driver is required."
Plugging it in, the device *is* automatically detected:
# cat /proc/scsi/usb-storage-0/1
Host scsi1: usb-storage
Vendor: JMTek
Product: USBDrive
Serial Number: None
Protocol: Transparent SCSI
Transport: Bulk
GUID: 0c7600030000000000000000
Attached: Yes
And cdrecord -scanbus reports it as:
[...]
scsibus1:
1,0,0 100) 'RiteLink' ' mass storage ' '1.00' Removable Disk
At first I thought it might appear to be a CDRW drive for some reason,
so I wasted quite a while trying to work out what the mappings between
device names reported by cdrecord are as Linux device files. (E.g.
dev=0,0,0 == /dev/scd0, dev=0,1,0 == /dev/scd1.) But those devices
stop at scd7, and that only covers scsibus0. I couldn't find out how
to map scsibus1 dev names to Linux device names.
Not that that matters, I guess, since it was a wild goose chase.
I could read raw data off it as /dev/sda, and did an fdisk (l) on
/dev/sda, which reported the partition type as FAT16. But when I try to
mount it as a FAT file system, mount failed:
# mount /dev/sda -t vfat /mnt/tmp
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda,
or too many mounted file systems
(Alert readers will have already spotted my mistake. My excuse is lack
of sleep after returning from Hong Kong, where I bought it for about
$75 dollars Australian, incidentally.)
/var/log/messages showed:
For -t vfat:
May 19 23:18:43 posh kernel: FAT: bogus logical sector size 20487
May 19 23:18:43 posh kernel: VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev 08:00.
And fdisk told me:
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sda: 3 heads, 42 sectors, 1010 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 126 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1011 63632 6 FAT16
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(0, 1, 1) logical=(0, 0, 33)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(964, 17, 32) logical=(1010, 0, 36)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
phys=(964, 17, 32) should be (964, 2, 42)
Eventually my other brain cell woke up, and I realised that I should
have been mounting partition 1, not the raw drive:
# mount /dev/sda1 -t vfat /mnt/tmp
So, it works fine as advertised. I just added this to /etc/fstab for
extra convenience:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/cf vfat user,noauto,gid=52,umask=007 0 0
Though I note in passing that it's not obvious which of the many fdisk
partition types match which kernel modules or which mount file system
name types, either.
0 Empty 1b Hidden Win95 FA 64 Novell Netware bb Boot Wizard hid
1 FAT12 1c Hidden Win95 FA 65 Novell Netware c1 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
2 XENIX root 1e Hidden Win95 FA 70 DiskSecure Mult c4 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
3 XENIX usr 24 NEC DOS 75 PC/IX c6 DRDOS/sec (FAT-
4 FAT16 <32M 39 Plan 9 80 Old Minix c7 Syrinx
5 Extended 3c PartitionMagic 81 Minix / old Lin da Non-FS data
6 FAT16 40 Venix 80286 82 Linux swap db CP/M / CTOS / .
7 HPFS/NTFS 41 PPC PReP Boot 83 Linux de Dell Utility
8 AIX 42 SFS 84 OS/2 hidden C: df BootIt
9 AIX bootable 4d QNX4.x 85 Linux extended e1 DOS access
a OS/2 Boot Manag 4e QNX4.x 2nd part 86 NTFS volume set e3 DOS R/O
b Win95 FAT32 4f QNX4.x 3rd part 87 NTFS volume set e4 SpeedStor
c Win95 FAT32 (LB 50 OnTrack DM 8e Linux LVM eb BeOS fs
e Win95 FAT16 (LB 51 OnTrack DM6 Aux 93 Amoeba ee EFI GPT
f Win95 Ext'd (LB 52 CP/M 94 Amoeba BBT ef EFI (FAT-12/16/
10 OPUS 53 OnTrack DM6 Aux 9f BSD/OS f1 SpeedStor
11 Hidden FAT12 54 OnTrackDM6 a0 IBM Thinkpad hi f4 SpeedStor
12 Compaq diagnost 55 EZ-Drive a5 BSD/386 f2 DOS secondary
14 Hidden FAT16 <3 56 Golden Bow a6 OpenBSD fd Linux raid auto
16 Hidden FAT16 5c Priam Edisk a7 NeXTSTEP fe LANstep
17 Hidden HPFS/NTF 61 SpeedStor b7 BSDI fs ff BBT
18 AST SmartSleep 63 GNU HURD or Sys b8 BSDI swap
luke
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