USB drives

[Dave Andruczyk]

--- green_man <green_man at bluefrog.biz> wrote:

> Is there any way in Linux to find out who manufactured a device ?
> I have a USB flash drive that works perfrectly with any one of the 
> several Knoppix/Debian based live Cds using the 2.4x kernels.
> I plug it in and it shows up in emelFM as sda1, and I can mount it, read 
> and write to it. Truly plug and play.
> However in Win 98SE, device manager wants a driver for it, but doesn't 
> have one.
> The vendors advice is go to the manufacturer's web site and download the 
> driver, but I have no idea who made the thing.
> All it says on the outside is "Flash Drive USB 2.0 128MB"
> It must be stored somewhere in the device, somehow, so that windows 
> knows what driver to look for.

Try lsusb or lsusb -v (as root)

> 
> Also, since I am completely ignorant of how these things work, can they 
> be re-partitioned ?

As far as I know they can,  but then they may NOT be readable in windows esp if
you use a different filesystem than FAT/FAT32. Whatever you do do NOT use a
journalling filesystem on a flash drive as the journal activity will
prematurely "wear out" the flash drive.   (flash devices have finite numbers of
write cycles)  the safe bet is to use EXT2 or FAT32.

> Could I take a 256 MB flash drive and split it into sda1 and sda2 of 128 
> MB each, or is the format permanently set ?

I believe that IS possible,  I unfortuately don't have one here to test
against...  I think that it may NOT work in windows though,  you'd have to do
some THOROUGH testing to make sure though....




=====
Dave J. Andruczyk


		
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