[CentOS] USB flash drive stopped working properly....

Mon Feb 26 23:15:44 UTC 2007
Mark Hull-Richter <mhull-richter at datallegro.com>

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 at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at 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.
>