[ILUG] USB mass storage woes

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Marek McGann (m.mcgann at sussex.ac.uk):

> There is a /dev/sda1 now, but mount claims it's not a valid block
> device.
> 
> Also tried Rick's suggestion of just using /dev/sda, but same story.

Could be a damaged volume.

Had a visiting financial consultant try to give the executives some
spreadsheets on her USB flash drive, which she'd written to using her
WinXP laptop.  Problem symptom:  The executives could not mount her
drive on Win2k; the OS detected the insertion event but then
mysteriously failed to show the volume among valid "drive letters", etc.
in Windows Explorer and elsewhere.

I took it to my desktop Linux box and personal laptop for testing, and
_happened_ to be able to mount it, as could the consultant on her XP
laptop.  However, Abiword and OpenOffice.org Calc both segfaulted when I
tried to open the spreadsheet, as did Excel when I moved the spreadsheet
over to Win2k via the LAN.  So things seemed very mysterious until I
double-checked with the consultant on how she used the drive:

  Me:  So, when you wrote your spreadsheet to there, you did a software
  eject before yanking the device from the USB slot, right?

  Consultant:  What's a software eject?

She'd been in the habit of yanking the USB drive out _while_ write
operations were still underway, damaging, as it turned out, both the
copy of the Excel spreadsheet on the destination drive and the volume on
which it was stored.  Reformatting the drive and recopying the
spreadsheet _fully_ before yanking the drive fixed all the problems.