BeigeJournal

I have an old 32MB USB flash memory device that works fine on a number of Linux systems. All that was needed, given that the USB support was already in the kernels, was a line something like this:

in /etc/fstab to allow mounting of the drive.

Several people with newer, higher capacity devices have not been able to use them with the old RedHat 8 box at work, however. We’d get errors in /var/log/messages such as the following:

kernel: Device not ready.  Make sure there is a disc in the drive.
kernel: sda : READ CAPACITY failed.
kernel: sda : status = 1, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
kernel: Info fld=0xa00 (nonstd), Current sd00:00: sense key Not Ready
kernel: sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
kernel:  sda: I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
kernel:  unable to read partition table

I was unable to find any useful advice on the web. I took one of these drives home to test there and it worked fine on that system, an old P-III with Fedora Core 2 and a 2.6 kernel.

The answer to the problem of some USB flash drives working and others not, apparently, is upgrade to a current kernel.