# Got a universal smart drive for Xmas can it work ?

## bleakcabal

Hi, I just got a universal smart drive for christmas. It's says behind the box it worked for linux so my parents bought it. In the instruction manuals it says to do 

ls /proc/scsi/usb-storage-0

cat /proc/scsi/usb-storage-0/0

up to this point everything works. it seems to detect it !

fdisk /dev/sda 

Here I am confused. When I type this it says enter commands. M for help. I tried a few things but I don't know WHAT I should be doing. 

Then 

mkfs.msdos /dev/sda1

Here it didnt work but I recompiled the kernel with msdos support and played around a bit so that when I do

mkfs -t msdos /dev/sda1 

It says mkfs.msdos: No such file or directory instead of Msdos not supported. But there is a file /dev/sda1 !

Then it says 

mkdir /mnt/usd

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usd

but here I get mount: you must specify the filesystem type

Looking at their websites it said I should edit my fstab with this line : 

/dev/sda1 		/mnt/usd 	msdos		defaults 		0 0

which I did but the only thing that changed is that at boot I get a message that not all file systems were mounted error.

Could somebody help me sort this out  please ?

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## delta407

 *bleakcabal wrote:*   

> fdisk /dev/sda 
> 
> Here I am confused. When I type this it says enter commands. M for help. I tried a few things but I don't know WHAT I should be doing.

 I think you're supposed to make a partition; hit O (new partition table), N (new partition), P (primary), 1 (first partition), and hit enter three (?) times to make it use the whole thing. Then hit W and watch the magic.

 *bleakcabal wrote:*   

> mkfs -t msdos /dev/sda1 
> 
> It says mkfs.msdos: No such file or directory

 

Try "emerge dosfstools" first.

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## bleakcabal

Now when I try to mount it says mount : fs type vfat not supported by kernel 

But not only did I do the emerge you told me about which made mkfs.msdos work ( thanks ! ) but I checked in File Systems and my kernel config and vfat ( win 95 ) is already compiled in ?

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## delta407

Make sure /boot was mounted when you copied over your new kernel. You can use 'uname -a' to see when your kernel was compiled -- that will let you make sure you're running the kernel you think you are.

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## bleakcabal

I JUST NOTICED THAT MY KERNEL HASN"T BEEN UPDATED SINCE 18 OCTOBER ! That's when I installed it !!! I tought I recompiled it successfully many times since then !

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## delta407

Again, make sure /boot is mounted before you copy in your new kernel, and make sure /etc/grub/menu.lst is pointing to the new kernel.

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## bleakcabal

I think I recompiled my kernel succesfully before, or I haven't recompiled it successfully now ! 

I followed the same instructions as in the gentoo install guide.

But I have never heard of this /etc/grub/menu.lst thingy.

This file does not even exist in this directory on my comp and I have grub.

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## Zalator

first of all, its /boot/grub/menu.lst, or, with the new version of grub, grub.conf

secondly, to make a fat filesystem I use mkdosfs, i'm not sure if thats the same as the mkfs.msdos command...

but anyway, for mkdosfs (which is a part of dosfstools package) , you want to use mkdosfs -F 32 (for fat 32) /dev/sda1

then, you can mount it with mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/wherever ...

--

An easier program to use than fdsik is cfdisk, which is under sys-apps/util-linux.

---

the kernel problem you are having is probably because you havent mounted your boot partition onto /boot before you've copied the new bzImage in. That's the reason why your kernel hasnt updated, because you havent actually copied the kernel image to where it's supposed to be.

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