According to Vikas Rawal,
you already asked before .. :-)
I didn't...perhaps somebody else did. I just got my disk yesterday
evening, and been struggling!!
did you do any homework since posting?
- google or yahoo or yahoo.in
I did spend a few hours trying to dig something out. But couldn't find a
solution. It is annoying when somebody posts a question to a mailing
list without doing any homework. It is frustrating when you are atuck,
have done homework, and still are subjected to hostility simply because
you try seeking help.
Anyway, thanks for useful questions. I had tried these (taking clues
from whatever I could get out of google). I am giving the answers in the
hope that somebody can use them to help.
are you 100% sure that its vfat format??
- did you format it
Yes, I formatted it as a fat32 partition. Windows XP accesses it all right.
does your kernel support vfat fs ??
Yes it does, because it can read a fat32 partition on my internal harddisk.
When I do "/sbin/fdisk -l /dev/sda", there is no output, I just get a
command prompt. I also tried /sdb, /sdc etc. None work.
why does it not work ??
"-l" lists the existing partitions on the drives it finds ..
can it even see the drive ??? ( without the -l option )
cat /proc/partions to see what partitions you have on all
the drives in your system, including /dev/sd[abc]
I've seen whole usb flash drives be unpartitioned before, in
which case it would be 'mount /dev/sda /mnt/sda'.
The message log I posted shows that it does see something.
if it cannot see the drive ... why not ???
do you have the usb support in the kernel
do you have the usb disk modules loaded what is your modules.conf file or
modutils
what modules is loaded ?
lsmod | sort
"lsmod | sort" shows, among other things,
usbcore 52268 1 [usb-storage ehci-hcd usb-uhci]
usb-storage 54496 0 (unused)
usb-uhci 19504 0 (unused)
With my limited knowledge, I thought it meant that the usb modules were
correctly installed.
The real verification would be if /proc/partitions or dmesg
shows the device. Some modules are infrastructure and don't
actually represent underlying hardware.
Once you've identified the device you might wish to set up
udev rules to always have it show symlink to e.g. /dev/external-usb-drive
and then you can put a constant entry in your /etc/fstab.
But that requires a late kernel and is beyond the scope of
this question. But there are howtos out there.