PNY flash drive on PC running RH 9.1 vs. RH 7.1

I have been trying to get a PNY USB 2.0 FD flash drive to work on two PC's, one of which has RH 7.1 and the other of which has RH 9.1. I have succeeded in getting it to work on the one with RH 7.1 but I don't know for certain which of the things I did are responsible for it working. I am unable to get it to work on the one with RH 9.1.

Basically, on the one with RH 7.1, I created a file namedetc-updfstab.conf and placed

symlink false device flash { match hd flash }

in it. I also added the linedev-sda1 mnt-flash auto noauto,owner 0 0 to the fileetc-fstab. I also created the directorymnt-flash and executedusr-sbin-modprob usb-storage just in case and found after plugging in the flash drive thatproc-scsi-scsi-usb-storage-0-0 contained all the information about the flash drive. Then I mounted it with the command mount -t msdosdev-sda1mnt-flash and was able to read and write to the flash drive with no difficulty.

Question: is there such a thing as formatting the flash drive for Linux, e.g. with an ext2 file system? If so, how.

On the other PC, with RH 9.1, there was already a fileetc-updfstab.conf which simply sourced another file namedetc-updfstab.conf.default. The entry for flash in the latter read

device flash { parbreastion 1 match hd CompactFlash match hd ImageMate }

I have no idea what these are. I added match hd PNY as a third option inetc-updfstab.conf after the default file was read in, since later entries override earlier ones. I also tried it with the same version I used on the RH 7.1 system. In neither case could I mount the flash drive. It did create the fileproc-scsi-usb-storage-0-0 with the right information but it said that is is not attached. The error message when I plugged in the flash drive was, according to dmesg:

hub.c: already running port 1 disabled by hub (EMI?), re-enabling usb.c: USB disconnect on device 00:1d.0-1 address 2 hub.c: Cannot enable port 1 of hub 1, disabling port. hub.c: Maybe the USB cable is bad?

As I already mentioned, it works on RH 7.1 without the cable but I get this error message on RH 9.1 with or without the cable. When I execute

mount -t msdosdev-sda1mnt-flash

I get the error message

mount:dev-sda1 is not a valid block device

which I think means it isn't detecting the flash drive, which is consistent with the proc file saying the device is not attached. I have no idea which of thedev-sd* devices is the right one to use. On RH 7.1, I first trieddev-sda and got an error message. When I useddev-sda1, it worked fine. None of the choices works on the RH 9.1 but that might be irrelevant, the real problem being that Linux thinks the flash drive is not attached.

Anyway, the differences in the configurations of the various filesetc-*fstab* between the two versions of RH show that there might be some features of the upgraded OS that I need to understand. I suspect that I'm actually close to being able to get the flash drive to work on the RH 9.1 system. If you know how to do it, based on the above, please let me know. -- Ignorantly, * Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT CSAIL. My actions and * comments do not reflect in any way on MIT. Also, I am nowhere near Boston.