Futzing with a USB storage thingeee

Nov 16, 2007 12:54

I was given a box of MySQL PS swag. One of the items is a 256MB USB storage thingeee. I just tried mounting it for the first time today, it's got some interesting quirks.

  • It doesnt have a MBR or a partition table, instead just formatted like a floppy disk, with a msdos boot sector at the start. This is different from all the other storage thingees I own, which are all formatted like HDs, and have a partition table. This difference sometimes confused the hald automounter.
  • It has no MSDOS filesystem label. Thus it got mounted as "/media/disk". That I consider a weakness in the hald automounter. If there is no disklabel, there are lots of good things to fallback to. Maybe I should dig into hald and see how hard this would be to add and how welcomeing they would be to the patch.
    • MSDOS fs serialnumber: "A018-E668"
    • SCSI device serialnumber: "4CD98788"
    • USB device serialnumber: "4CD98788"
    • SCSI bus,channel,id,lun,vendor,model: "05000000 Generic Storage Alcor Flash Disk"
    • USB bus,port,dev,mfgr,prod: "040317 Generic Mass Storage"
  • And when I dump out the raw sector blocks, most of the them are just strings of "FF", but occationally there is a 32bit value at the beginning or end of a sector. Maybe the remains of the factory qualification tests?

I'm thinking of reformatting it, and then keeping my MySQL SSH key on it.

msdos, linux, hal, geek, usb

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