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Re: USB stick broken?



On Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 02:11:37PM -0500, Jay Zach wrote:
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> 
> Klaus Pieper wrote:
> >>
> >> host# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1K count=1
> >>
> > 
> > etch:~# dd if=/dev/sdb of=mbr bs=1k count=1
> > dd: opening `/dev/sdb': No medium found
> > 
> > 
> 
> It doesn't work, because Linux never assigned /dev/sdb to the scsi address that
> it had scanned.
> I'm no usb expert, but I do know that much....
> Not sure where to go with it from there.  Hopefully some usb expert will jump in...
> 
> I'm guessing that it might be an issue with hotplug or usbdev, or possibly just
> a bad usb stick...
> I've had similar issues before, and had some luck googling them..

There are enough different things that can go wrong with usb under debian in the
hands of a usb-clueless user that I would say that the memory is likely _not_ 
broken. One of the complexities that implementors try to hide has become unhidden.

Look in log files for what system messages when you plugged in the memory. One of
them may tell you what device ID the system assigned to the memory. On my machine
it is /deb/sd[a-h]1 . (I have eight places where I can plug in usb devices.)
If you have, or will have in the future, more than one usb device, you should set
up udev properly. In Debian, udev is automatically setup to behave in a way that
does no harm to old style device handling. But it does not really handle usb
device assignment until you customize it. Look at

http://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html

Also, you can quickly check if memory is bad by plugging it into a friend's Mac
or Windoze computer. If it work there, it will work in Debian, after some setup.

HTH

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@mesanetworks.net



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