On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 00:23 -0500, Robert Nichols wrote: > Christopher A. Williams wrote: > > I recently bought a snazzy new 16GB USB pen drive from the local store - > > it was only $29! I have several drives that are 8GB and smaller from the > > same store that are the same brand. > > > > Imagine my surprise when: > > * The 16GB drive is not accessible on either F9 or F10 Snap 3 > > * The 8GB drives all work just fine on both F9 and F10 Snap 3 > > * The 16GB drive works fine on Windows XP > > * The 16GB drive also works on a Windows XP VM running on top of F9!!! > > <snip...> > I've seen several USB pen drives with inconsistent partition tables, > such as a CHS geometry that leaves a few unallocated sectors (no great > surprise) but a partition with a sector count that goes beyond the > claimed last cylinder and does use the entire device. Automount is > deliberately made sensitive to such anomalies. > > Take a look at what "fdisk -l" and "fsck.msdos" have to say about the > drive. Errors such as "Partition has different physical/logical > endings" should be cause for concern. You might need to repartition > the device and/or rebuild the filesystem. Thanks - This made complete sense to me - and you were right! Here's the output of fdisk: Disk /dev/sdb: 16.0 GB, 16039018496 bytes 75 heads, 40 sectors/track, 10442 cylinders Units = cylinders of 3000 * 512 = 1536000 bytes Disk identifier: 0xc3072e18 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 1 10443 15663084 c W95 FAT32 (LBA) ...And here's a summary of what fsck.msdos said: dosfsck 2.11, 12 Mar 2005, FAT32, LFN There are differences between boot sector and its backup. Differences: (offset:original/backup) 0:eb/00, 1:58/00, 2:90/00, 3:4d/00, 4:53/00, 5:44/00, 6:4f/00, 7:53/00 , 8:35/00, 9:2e/00, 10:30/00, 12:02/00, 13:10/00, 14:24/00, 16:02/00 ... , 497:74/00, 498:0d/00, 499:0a/00, 505:ac/00, 506:cb/00, 507:d8/00 , 510:55/00, 511:aa/00 1) Copy original to backup 2) Copy backup to original 3) No action ? ...followed by messages about cluster size mismatches, and the like. So I repartitioned and re-formatted the drive (had to use my Windows XP VM for that - see question below), and voila! Now, one last question: what's the flag to format a FAT32 partition with mkfs? I saw options for pretty much everything but that. I'm probably just suffering from not having had my first cup of coffee... :) Cheers, Chris -- ================================== By all means marry; If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher. --Socrates -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines