I left out part of this (that I did after sending the message).

Apparently the problem isn't so much the flash drive as what happens when the icon on the gnome desktop doesn't go away - it refuses to be removed.

I can manually mount the flash drive to its proper mount point, and access it through the icon, but when I unmount it, the icon doesn't go away, and after that, until/unless I manually remount the drive again, the icon doesn't work (and won't unmount - duh!).

Now I'm not sure if this is a gnome issue or a CentOS issue. If I log out and log back in, the icon still doesn't go away (implicating the OS), but when I reboot, all is well again, for a while....

Thanks.

PS: John, the drive was not actually mounted when this happened, so a dd would not work, either - it didn't even matter if the drive was plugged in or not - the icon was there and unusable/misbehavin'.

Thanks.

-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of John Summerfield Sent: Monday, February 26, 2007 2:25 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] USB flash drive stopped working properly....

Next time, dd if=/dev/sda count=1 | xxd | less

I don't propose to decode the partition table (I could, but it would take me longer than I'd do free), but I suspect that the invalid partition table will be clearly wrong, maybe all binary zeros.

To see what a good partition table looks like, dump /dev/hda or some other.

The important stuff is here:

00001b0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 39cb 0200 0000 0001 ........9....... 00001c0: 0100 83fe 3f02 3f00 0000 04bc 0000 8000 ....?.?......... 00001d0: 0103 06fe 3f04 43bc 0000 827d 0000 0000 ....?.C....}.... 00001e0: 0105 83fe ffff c539 0100 3f14 a804 00fe .......9..?..... 00001f0: ffff 05fe ffff 044e a904 00a6 5009 55aa .......N....P.U.

and the 55aa at the end is crucial: if that's not 55aa, nothing else matters.

btw I suggest using dd to take a full copy while it's working. If necessary, you can play with parted, extract the bits and gain an education later.