# Can't mount usb memory stick

## celloandy

I have a sandisk cruzer mini 256, and am having trouble mounting it.  I plug it in, and it seems to be detected (entries in dmesg).  sdb and sdb1 also show up in /dev (with udev), which seems good, but when I try to mount the thing, it tells me that I have to specify fs type.  I tried 'mount -t vfat', but it says that's the wrong type.  It's weird, because the drive works under windows, and with a Gnoppix cd I have (which also uses a 2.6 kernel), and the Gnoppix cd doesn't even make me specify fs type, it just works.  Vfat and 'ms-dos filesystem' are both built into my kernel, as are usb-mass-storage and uhci (I have a uhci mb).  Suggestions?

Andrew

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## steveb

could you post the complete mount command you use to mount the stick?

cheers

SteveB

btw: gnoppix does automaticly add entries to /etc/fstab for each device it finds. you could look there how it configured your stick to be mounted.

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## johngalt

I ran into a similar problem - when mounting I had to leave off a partition identifier (sdb as opposed to sdbx) to get mine mounted.

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## celloandy

Here's my output:

```
% dmesg

...

usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using address 3

scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices

  Vendor: Generic   Model: STORAGE DEVICE    Rev: 1.25

  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02

SCSI device sdb: 512000 512-byte hdwr sectors (262 MB)

sdb: assuming Write Enabled

sdb: assuming drive cache: write through

 /dev/scsi/host2/bus0/target0/lun0: p1

Attached scsi removable disk sdb at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0

USB Mass Storage device found at 3

```

```
% mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usbstick

mount: you must specify the filesystem type

```

```
% mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usbstick

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,

       or too many mounted file systems

```

Replacing /dev/sdb1 with /dev/sdb doesn't seem to change output.  As for the fstab on Gnoppix, it had fs set as auto, so it shouldn't matter.  In any even, I tried coppying the stuff from Gnoppix into my fstab, and it still asks me to specify an fs type, which Gnoppix doesn't do.

Andrew

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## celloandy

Also, in dmesg after trying the mounts, I get an error "VFAT: codepage cp437 not found."  Don't know what that means.

Andrew

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## celloandy

I added support for codepage 437 under the Native Language Support section of the kernel config, and recompiled... now the thing mounts, but all of the file names are truncated dos-style (six characters plus a ~ and a number), and none of the directories show up as directories, just files.  This behavior is, again, different than that of Gnoppix, so I don't think it's the device that's messed up.

Andrew

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## celloandy

Also added support for ISO-8859-1 in kernel, and it'll now let me mount the thing as vfat instead of msdos, and the filenames look better, but the directories are all missing.  Only the files in the root directory of the stick are visible.

Andrew

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## celloandy

Rebooted... seems to work, now.

Andrew

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## tollwilly125

great solution! i had the same exact problem, and it took me forever to fix it.

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## Dephyler

Thanks celloandy! This was all I needed to do to get it working. After I compiled those options in, a simple:

```
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb
```

worked great!

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## richk449

I am having the same problem, but I have codepage 437 and ISO 8859-1 compiled in already.  Any suggestions?

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## z-man

hey thanks from me too.

the truncated files were really annoying me. lucky me, this topic was first on this gentoo forum subject.

feeling happy....=D

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