I have been having difficult with usb thumb style drives and FC1 / FC2 for a long time. I have scoured the web for reports of similar problems and solutions. While I found quite a number of problem reports there were no solutions. In fact, to the contrary, people seemed to abandon the search. Recently I purchased a Lexar JumpDrive (128 mbytes), which replaced the 256 Mbytes Sandisk MiniCruiser that I just knew was bad. Well, it worked great and I didn't give it a second thought.... My wife, kind soul that she is, went out and bought me the 256 Mbyte Lexar Jumpdrive. I was excited. I had another jumpdrive with twice the capacity.... I was shocked when I plugged it into my system and had the exact problem I had seen with the MiniCruiser. The problem scenario looks like a defective device. The system tries multiple-times to mount it, then ultimately comes up with some timeout messages and a message that says that the fat filesystem is unreadable!!! After many days I have found the source of the problem. If I have gpilotd ( version 2.0.10) running on my system I can mount and use 128Mbyte jumpdrives and lower, but it will not allow me to use anything of higher capacity then this. If I kill or pause the gpilotd, EVERYTHING works just fine!!! I can use both of my 256 Mbyte usb drives as well as all the lower capacity ones that I now own.... Gpilotd has some real problems. It is somehow getting in the way of my use of the jump drives, and it will not allow an easy hot-sync with my Sony Clie. I have to try multiple times. Sometimes I have to try and then recycle the gpilotd, before I can get a successful sync. There is a real problem with this daemon.... Sadly, I think I'm the only person that has seen this relationship.. Anyway, for all of you that have been having these types of usbdrive problems I would suggest you make sure and try it without gpilotd running in the mix.... -- Sam Williams samurai@xxxxxxx +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +"It is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of computers + + by the sense of accomplishment you get from getting them to work at + + all." + + - Douglas Adams + +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
