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On 24/08/13 18:34, bad apple wrote:
You wouldn't think so in 2013, but annoyingly, this happens quite a lot - USB sticks sometimes not being completely interoperable on what seem to be basically identical machines. I see this most on Macs for some reason, which are the most fussy about USB sticks, particularly ones I've formatted and prepped up on a Linux box, taken to a client's remote office somewhere, only to find their MacBook won't open it. Grrr. There are a lot of parameters that can throw machines off - rounding of cylinders to boundaries incorrectly, weird 'dirty' filesystem flags, etc: here's how I attempt to make my USB drives as painless as possible. It seems a bit counter-intuitive, but for once I have the most luck with doing it really simple GUI style rather than with cryptic terminal commands. I particularly like gparted*, so if you don't already have it install it:
Already installed. I use it quite often.
As I have said previously, I have these three memory sticks and an external hard drive. In every case I have, as a first task at purchase, opened them up with gparted, unmounted them, and formatted them in every case to ext4. By this I mean that I just ask gparted to format to ext4 and left it to format the whole stick/disk. I have never bothered with any separate partitions so the whole stick/disk has just one partition. As I have Linux only this has always been fine. This is the first problem that I have had.With your USB drive plugged in, obviously. Use gparted to find your USB drive and completely nuke whatever partitions are already on there (some drives, Kingston included, ship with a stupid "utility" partition and a bunch of crappy autorun stuff for windows - blow this away with extreme prejudice). It's unlikely to alter this, but double-check when you create a new partition(s) that the disk layout type is traditional MSDOS, not GPT - the latter is possible, but tends to just create more problems. Once you have created your new partition layout - just one big partition is normal, but I often have a small (~250Mb) partition at the start for keeping Truecrypt binaries for the three main OS versions and other utilities and the rest of the drive is a secondary partition that will be encrypted - you can use gparted to format the new partitions to whatever filesystem you prefer.
This Kingston stick had previously had this treatment. I checked what was on there, realised it was no longer wanted and so reformatted it a couple of days ago. Previously this Kingston stick had been used on my desktop only. In fact all three sticks had been used on the desktop only until yesterday. This was my first trial on the laptop. The other two sticks have stuff on which I want to keep so I just checked them on the laptop to see if they were ok and they were. It was only the newly formatted Kingston stick which is having problems.
Thanks for all your help and advice, Neil -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq