[plug] usb storage howto

[Bernd Felsche]

Gavin Chester <sales at ecosolutions.com.au> writes:

>Trying to work out how to put files on a SD card fitted into a mp3
>player.  I have never dealt with these things before and guessed that I
>had to format it first.  It's a 1GB card and I only have the mp3 player
>to put it in - no external card reader.

Cards are formatted when you get them; unless it's off the factory
floor...

>I found a howto that had this to say:
>"To format the drive in superfloppy format, you simply do: 
>	mkdosfs -I /dev/sda
>Formatting in harddisk requires more steps, if it's not already 
>formatted that way: 
>	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
>to erase the start of the USB Key. After that you can do a
>"fdisk /dev/sda" and create a new FAT partition (FAT16 is suitable)."

>As well as that I vaguely remember (was it on this list?) talk that
>linux won't recognise a usb memory stick or other storage device unless
>its partitioned.  Does this apply to my device's card or can I use the 
>superfloppy format?

Linux does recognize the drive as /dev/sdx. You can put a filesystem
on tehre and that's how I use my cheapy mp3 player. I didn't have to
format it... it was formatted already.

>I identified the card was /dev/sdc on my system, ran superfloppy 
>(seemed easiest), was able to mount the card and seemed to be able to
>write to it.  But when I unmounted and disconnected the player it
>complained that there were no files on the card.  A double-check
>showed that mkdosfs used fat32 - is this a problem?  I had an idea 
>that maybe fat16 might be needed :-/

Many players will only recognize one sort of filesystem. They're
quite bigoted.

On a related matter, i was playing around with a 2GB thumb drive to
turn it into a magic wand for installation; and ran into the same
issue with BIOS that can only boot off a FAT16 filesystem on a
USB-HDD. So I partitioned the stick... with a small FAT16 for boot
and the other containing the main distribution on a sane filesystem;
but still haven't managed to iron out the last few wrinkles.

And just to throw a spanner in the works; some flash drives refuse
to be partitioned.