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Old 1st November 2008
JMJ_coder JMJ_coder is offline
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Default How can I tell if my USB drive is bad?

Hello,

Like the title asks. I have an old SanDisk Cruzer - 128MB. I plugged it into my new laptop and nothing - it was recognized, but didn't configure it to be mounted. That is, I got the umass0 and scsibus0, but no mention of the sd0 in the messages when I plugged it in.

I thought maybe there was something wrong with the USB port or kernel until I thought to try another USB drive - a newer 2GB Cruzer. And to my relief it was recognized, configured and I was able to mount it. But that raises the question of whether the 128MB drive is then bad. It is able to be mounted on my other computers running Slackware and Windows and on the Windows machines at the University. But, this drive is no spring chicken - and I have corrupted the data on it more than once. Is there a way for me to definitively test this thing?
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Old 1st November 2008
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JMJ_coder View Post
But that raises the question of whether the 128MB drive is then bad. It is able to be mounted on my other computers running Slackware and Windows and on the Windows machines at the University.
You may have jumped to the wrong conclusion, & I can only assume that you are finding this USB drive "bad" on a NetBSD system.

Different operating systems identify USB devices differently. It is common that the *BSD's look for known signatures, & code is auto-generated to handle these specific signatures. WRT NetBSD, the following appears to be the top-level abstraction of known devices:

http://opengrok.netbsd.org/source/xr...ev/usb/usbdevs

It may be worth your time to poke about the other files in this directory to see how other consumer USB devices are handled.

The point here is that it is entire possible that a fully functional device may be correctly identified in one operating system but not by another.
Quote:
But, this drive is no spring chicken - and I have corrupted the data on it more than once. Is there a way for me to definitively test this thing?
This might be evidence indicating that the device is nearly its end. I am not familiar with any means in which these solid-state memory devices can be tested, but given that the price has dropped so low (I see 8GB flash drives on Amazon for ~$20US...), how much effort is this drive worth?
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Old 2nd November 2008
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lvlamb lvlamb is offline
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128M should be a "floppy mode" stick.
1- What is it formatted to? With fdisk or plain FAT16|32?
2- BIOS (@$%^$#crap)
Should be an entry to define floppy or hard drive mode. My recent Intel (#$%^%$#) BIOS has Auto, all HD, all removable, (citing from memory).
Set as "auto" does not work reliably. Set as all HD, my 4G stick boots but not my 500G external USB drive (old archeological floppy message: Loading ... ERR M).
3-The where sticks with a "3" in the label|make, these are Win|trash only.
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Old 2nd November 2008
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
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The settings mentioned about lvlamb are real mode specific, the BIOS is able to emulate a floppy/hard drive.

In protected mode, (i.e: 32-bit mode), the kernel is unaware of this emulation.. it communicates directly with the PCI bus, USB bus and eventually to the device.

Why your device isn't working is unknown, the fact that it's working on other operating systems may indicate the device is "quirky".. i.e: substandard implementation of the USB mass storage protocol.

Try booting an OpenBSD livecd, see if it gets detected..
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Old 3rd November 2008
JMJ_coder JMJ_coder is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BSDfan666 View Post
Why your device isn't working is unknown, the fact that it's working on other operating systems may indicate the device is "quirky".. i.e: substandard implementation of the USB mass storage protocol.
Could be, but it has worked on NetBSD on my HP machine. But, ocicat is right - it probably isn't worth my effort right now, especially since I know that it isn't a problem with the usb stack itself. Maybe during break, if I'm bored, I can looked into it further.

Thanks for the replies.
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