"/dev/sda1 does not exist" Why????

[Charles Curley]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 04:00:46PM -0500, Steven Pasternak wrote:
> I use FC3 kernel 2.6.9-1.667 and when I plug my USB pen drive in and  click on 
> the kde icon I made it says that "/dev/sda1 doesn't exist". If I open a super 
> user terminal and go to /dev and type 'MAKEDEV sda1' it makes it, but says it 
> doesn't say that it is a valid block device. WHY??

Several things could be happening.

Possibly hotplug is not recognizing your drive, so it never creates a
device file for it. Or perhaps it does recognize your device, but
incorrectly.

Before you plug the drive in, run (as root):

tail -f /var/log/messages

While you plug the drive in, see what messages you get from the
kernel. It should tell you what device(s) it sees and creates for you.

Also, it may take hotplug a while to do its thing; give it up to 20
seconds before you give up on it.

Here is what I see:

Jan 17 20:29:38 charlesc kernel: usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9
Jan 17 20:29:38 charlesc kernel: scsi8 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Jan 17 20:29:43 charlesc kernel:   Vendor: Kingston  Model: DataTraveler 2.0  Rev: 4.10
Jan 17 20:29:43 charlesc kernel:   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Jan 17 20:29:43 charlesc kernel: SCSI device sdb: 503808 512-byte hdwr sectors (258 MB)
Jan 17 20:29:43 charlesc kernel: sdb: Write Protect is off
Jan 17 20:29:43 charlesc kernel: sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
Jan 17 20:29:43 charlesc kernel: SCSI device sdb: 503808 512-byte hdwr sectors (258 MB)
Jan 17 20:29:43 charlesc kernel: sdb: Write Protect is off
Jan 17 20:29:43 charlesc kernel: sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
Jan 17 20:29:43 charlesc kernel:  sdb: sdb1
Jan 17 20:29:43 charlesc kernel: Attached scsi removable disk sdb at scsi8, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Jan 17 20:29:43 charlesc kernel: Attached scsi generic sg5 at scsi8, channel 0, id 0, lun 0,  type 0

This tells me I have a new device at sdb with a partition at sdb1,
with no write protection.

fdisk -l /dev/sdb

will tell you more about the drive's partitions.

-- 

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