USB key : what to do to get it working ???

[wernst]

I had a Kingston Data Traveler pen drive that worked fine in Win98, XP,
and OSX, but  Ubuntu Warty would complain about "Invalid Media Values"
and "Buffer I/O Errors" at the console when it was inserted, and it
refused to Mount.

I read this:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2004/12/msg04382.html

and figured that the parititon table was messed up on it. QTParted
could repartition this pen drive, and then it would mount on the
desktop ONE time only. None of my Windows utilities would repartition a
USB pen drive, but my Mac's OS X Disk Utilities was happy to.

So I used to to blow away the partition table and create a new UNIX
partition. Then I slapped it into Ubuntu and it mounted. I unmounted it
and reformatted it with: 
#> mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1

and it mounted fine. Then I slapped it back into windows and
reformatted it FAT32.

Finally, I tried it again in Ubuntu, and it works fine now throughout
all the platforms.

My Iomega keychain drives, on the other hand, worked just fine on all
the OSes right out of the box.

I hope this helps...

-Warr


-- 
wernst