[vox-tech] USB confusion

[Nick Schmalenberger]

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 03:00:36PM -0700, David Spencer, Internet Handyman wrote:
> I had an old eMachines computer sitting at my office doing nothing so I
> decided to put it to work. I installed CentOS workstation on it this morning.
> Now I have a fun little Linux machine for my personal use.
> 
> However, I more in mind than just building a playground computer. I had
> some SATA drives that I wanted to mount in external USB 2 enclosures and
> pull off some files. I plugged the enclosure into one of the USB ports on
> the computer and no reaction. Nothing. So I started to doubt that the USB
> was working, so I stuck in a thumb drive that I had. Normally, when I
> stick my thumb drive into my Mac, there's a light that comes on and the
> drive is mounted on the desktop. But once again, nothing. No lights, no
> autosense, nada.
> 
> So how do I figure this out guys? If I do directory of /dev I see four
> usbdev stubs (or whatever they're called) so I know that something USB
> was installed. Where should I start?
>
Check dmesg, when something happens that the kernel logs it goes
into dmesg and /var/log/messages on centos. Different distros and
other unixes have different log file names for this, but dmesg is
pretty much everywhere. It should say that the usb stick was
detected as a storage device and what partitions are on it. Then
you can mount the filesystem on the partition, or maybe there are
no partitions and the filesystem is just on the whole disk like a
floppy. Dmesg should say it was detected though, then you would
run something like mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt or maybe
mount -t vfat -o uid=yourusername /dev/sdb1 /mnt which would say
its a vfat filesystem and make everything owned by you instead of
root.
Nick Schmalenberger