[mdlug] USB dilemma

[Jeff Hanson]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 1:32 PM, Garry Stahl <tesral at comcast.net> wrote:
> Okay.  the problem is solved, but I am wondering what caused it.
>
>  I have a four gig flash drive.  It was slightly corrupted in that it has
>  several files that would not delete as they "didn't exist" but were
>  still there.  I reformatted the drive in Suse 9.3 with fat 32.
>
>  Since then every time I plugged that drive in the USB port it locked the
>  computer solid.  Reset button required.  Other flash drives did not do
>  this.   I could boot the computer with the drive in place and it would
>  work.  I could remove it no problem

Did you try the magic SysRq keys (Alt-SysRq-REISUB)?  That would tell
you if the Kernel actually locked vs. just X.  Normally if the kernel
panics then it flashes the keyboard keys repeatedly.  You could also
try to SSH in from another system.

I'm having problems with a SanDisk Cruzer 4GB USB flash drive.  I
formatted it ext3 and created a subdirectory with 777 permissions so I
could read/write from any account on any system.  ext3 is better than
vfat because it's more efficient (vfat has ridiculously large cluster
sizes on 4GB) and can handle characters the vfat can't (like colons).
But on some PCs I tried it with I couldn't copy files off
successfully.  Nautilus (Ubuntu Gutsy) would abort and the drive would
unmount.  I haven't figured out that one yet.

Interestingly, the SanDisk packaging shows the penguin for Linux
compatibility but for Vista its a sticker.