Busy hands | Disquiet mind

Previously:
- Manually mounting
- Manually setting permissions to read/write

Today, creating live-USB discs, and manual reformatting.

It began like this. The screen on my laptop broke. Big stripe from top to bottom, width of the hinge, all gone white. But that was okay, I took out the five year insurance, so off it went for repair. This left me with just my EEE netbook. It had a nicely functioning Fedora 11, but it's coming to the end of it's life now. I didn't want to upgrade to 12 before as I felt they were trying too many new things all at once. And I'm apprehensive of the new bootloader. But now with 13 they've had time to get it all working nicely. Time to take the leap.

I looked up the options. Upgrading seemed attractive. preupgrade looks fairly shiney, but my /boot partition was too small at the previously recommended 200MB, and my router is in a really awkward place to enable me to sit plugged into it for a while. So, other options, upgrade from media, install from live media. I didn't have any blank CDs or DVDs handy (I've an external DVD-drive so that's not a problem for my EEE), so I thought I'd try out the Live CD on USB thing. But the live CDs don't upgrade, only install. And sure, they've changed the recommended partitions, /boot is now 500MB, and /home gets its own. Okay, why not, let's give it a go.

Well, the good news is the images came down quickly. The rest is a bit of a saga.

( A bit of a ramble )

In summary, I don't know why I had these problems when others don't seem to. Every program I used was Fedora based. The only thing I can think of is that the USB drive was NTFS before I reformatted it for the first time. Or that the instructions are incomplete. But, what I learned is how to manually use mkfs and that (by default at least) it doesn't assign a label. Also, I'll think I'll stick to DVDs in the future.

Welcome to the first in the series of simple things I didn't need to know until I really, really did. This information is in note form, meaning very sumamrised. It's put here to jog my memory when I next need it. This issue is manually mounting a usb flash drive from the terminal in Linux.

Reference, and props: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/11637.html

lsusb
: lists the devices currently plugged into your usb ports.

dmesg | grep -i "SCSI device"
: lists the SCSI devices currently connected. Could be a hard-drive, typically a flash drive, look for the one with the right capacity, i.e. sdb

mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /home/Desktop/folder
: mount the drive to a folder, in vfat format, which most flash drives are.