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On 24/08/13 17:22, Neil Winchurst wrote: > I have tested this. With one of the sticks that works I do indeed get > /dev/sdb1. With the problem stick I get nothing. This is on the > laptop. However on the desktop I get /dev/sdb1 for all the sticks. > > I also have an external hard drive. On the desktop it is mounted > automatically and then Thunar is opened at the relevant page. > > On the laptop the HD is mounted but Thunar is not opened. If I start > up Thunar myself then it goes to the relevant page. > > The only difference I can think of is that on the desktop I am running > Xubuntu 12.04 whereas on the laptop it is version 13.04. > > However it is not really important I suppose. I must just remember > that the Kingston stick does not work on the laptop. No great deal. > > Neil > > You wouldn't think so in 2013, but annoyingly, this happens quite a lot - USB sticks sometimes not being completely interoperable on what seem to be basically identical machines. I see this most on Macs for some reason, which are the most fussy about USB sticks, particularly ones I've formatted and prepped up on a Linux box, taken to a client's remote office somewhere, only to find their MacBook won't open it. Grrr. There are a lot of parameters that can throw machines off - rounding of cylinders to boundaries incorrectly, weird 'dirty' filesystem flags, etc: here's how I attempt to make my USB drives as painless as possible. It seems a bit counter-intuitive, but for once I have the most luck with doing it really simple GUI style rather than with cryptic terminal commands. I particularly like gparted*, so if you don't already have it install it: sudo apt-get install gparted -y && gksudo gparted With your USB drive plugged in, obviously. Use gparted to find your USB drive and completely nuke whatever partitions are already on there (some drives, Kingston included, ship with a stupid "utility" partition and a bunch of crappy autorun stuff for windows - blow this away with extreme prejudice). It's unlikely to alter this, but double-check when you create a new partition(s) that the disk layout type is traditional MSDOS, not GPT - the latter is possible, but tends to just create more problems. Once you have created your new partition layout - just one big partition is normal, but I often have a small (~250Mb) partition at the start for keeping Truecrypt binaries for the three main OS versions and other utilities and the rest of the drive is a secondary partition that will be encrypted - you can use gparted to format the new partitions to whatever filesystem you prefer. Here I strongly advise against using FAT32 as suggested by someone earlier - true, it's definitely the most universal FS with decades of support in even obscure OS's but it is also total, unmitigated crap. It's slow, limited to a maximum filesize of 4Gb, isn't journalled (*shudder*) and has exactly zero of the features that any decent filesystem requires. Use FAT32 only if you have complete and utter contempt for the data you will be storing on it (so it's totally suitable for installing Win98 or OS/2 on for example)! FAT32 is also Microsoft-patent encumbered crap, which sadly, so are the two much better alternatives I'm going to recommend: NTFS and/or EXFAT. EXFAT is the much more modern replacement version for FAT32, although it doesn't have good linux support yet. It's trivial to install it though with: sudo apt-add-repository ppa:relan/exfat sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install fuse-exfat NTFS presumably needs no introduction - it's the world's most common computer FS, native to windows of course. Fortunately, pretty much everything can read/write NTFS with no problem - Linux support is tier 1 now with ntfs-3g (which you will almost definitely already have installed) and Macs by default can read NTFS, but not write it (until you manually adjust the /etc/fstab and enable write support, or install a 3rd party driver like Paragon NTFS). NTFS is even supported in Solaris, BSD, AIX and a whole bunch of other systems you'll probably never have to go near and trust me, it's by far the best choice, even if all of your machines are running Linux. If you whack your troublesome Kingston drive with a new single MSDOS partition, format it to NTFS and try again I'd bet even money it will work perfectly - obviously your laptop can see it, it just doesn't like the current partition layout or something. Give it a spin if you feel like it - I've learnt that you're frequently the sort of guy who reaches a certain point and just goes "ah screw it, it works well enough for me" which is by no means a bad trait (as opposed to me, who has no idea when enough is enough and frequently ends up breaking things that were 99.9% fine in the first place)... Cheers *For those allergic to Gnome libraries, you'll have to choose from parted or fdisk or whatever tool you like - I thought there was a "kparted" equivalent running on QT libraries but apparently not? -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq