[svlug] USB flashdrive problems

[Larry Colen]

We have what is effectively an embedded system. We are doing a
monolithic (no modules) 2.6.9 kernel. If need be, we could go to
modules, but for the time being we're stuck with 2.6.9. We need to
mount a USB flash drive as storage.

And, no, we can't go to	a post 2.6.15 kernel for a while.

Pretty much all of the documentation I find seems to be for mounting
USB on desktop systems under standard distributions.

If I boot the system from a live CD, it finds, mounts and reads the
flash drive just fine as sda1, vfat filesystem.

We don't need it to be hot pluggable, it can be there from boot. We
don't need plug and play.

No matter what I do, when I mount it, I get the error message:
bash-3.00# mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt
mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device

I've enabled SCSI, USB, UHCI, EHCI ...

Here is what I think is the relevent snippet from dmesg.

usb 6-1: new device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0, SerialNumber=3
usb 6-1: default language 0x0409
usb 6-1: SerialNumber: 20060221165700-00
usb 6-1: adding 6-1:1.0 (config #1, interface 0)
usb-storage 6-1:1.0: usb_probe_interface
usb-storage 6-1:1.0: usb_probe_interface - got id
usb-storage: USB Mass Storage device detected
usb-storage: -- associate_dev
usb-storage: Vendor: 0x0ef5, Product: 0x2202, Revision: 0x0100
usb-storage: Interface Subclass: 0x06, Protocol: 0x50
usb-storage: Vendor: Unknown,  Product: Unknown
usb-storage: Transport: Bulk
usb-storage: Protocol: Transparent SCSI
usb-storage: usb_stor_control_msg: rq=fe rqtype=a1 value=0000 index=00 len=1
usb-storage: GetMaxLUN command result is 1, data is 0
usb-storage: *** thread sleeping.
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
USB Mass Storage device found at 2
uhci_hcd 0000:00:1a.0: suspend_hc

Output of some other exploratory comands:

bash-3.00# cat /proc/filesystems
nodev   sysfs
nodev   rootfs
nodev   bdev
nodev   proc
nodev   sockfs
nodev   usbfs
nodev   usbdevfs
nodev   futexfs
nodev   tmpfs
nodev   pipefs
nodev   devpts
        ext2
nodev   ramfs
        msdos
        vfat
nodev   nfs
nodev   nfsd
        ntfs
nodev   rpc_pipefs

bash-3.00# cat devices
Character devices:
  1 mem
  4 /dev/vc/0
  4 tty
  4 ttyS
  5 /dev/tty
  5 /dev/console
  5 /dev/ptmx
  7 vcs
 10 misc
 13 input
 21 sg
128 ptm
136 pts
180 usb

Block devices:
  1 ramdisk
  2 fd
  7 loop
  8 sd
 65 sd
 66 sd
 67 sd
 68 sd
 69 sd
 70 sd
 71 sd
128 sd
129 sd
130 sd
131 sd
132 sd
133 sd
134 sd
135 sd

bash-3.00# cat scsi/usb-storage/0
   Host scsi0: usb-storage
       Vendor: Unknown
      Product: Unknown
Serial Number: 20060221165700-00
     Protocol: Transparent SCSI
    Transport: Bulk
       Quirks:

-- 
                Boole is well known. True or False?
Larry Colen             lrc at red4est.com            http://www.red4est.com/lrc