Another Ubuntu on external drive question

[Derek Broughton]

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:

> Does the pen drive have a filesystem, or can you
> install one on it, so that you can run a "bad
> sectors check" and mark as unusable the sectors
> that give read/write errors? [Yes, I know this
> suggestion is more than a little off the wall, pen
> drives are cheap enough that buying one that works
> correctly is usually a better option, but some of us
> are dirt poor and look first for the zero added cash
> options.]

It was a genuine rotating drive that I was using - Timothy was just
suggesting looking at how people create bootable pen-drives to figure out
what I was doing wrong.

In the case of my lousy external drive, it was (probably) not actually the
drive - there are no indications of bad blocks - but either the USB
interface on the drive or the actual cable (I didn't think these up
myself - there are plenty of comments about it on the web).  The cheap
drives just don't handle the transfer rate.  I could _probably_ force it to
be USB 1.1 and avoid data overruns, but that's not too useful :-)
-- 
derek