usb stick in gos 3 recognised but won't mount, works in XP

Hi i'm new on the forum but i have made quite an effort to solve this problem , if anyone can help i'll be much obliged.

i have an old hp nc4000 laptop and a sandisk 2gig usb stick which works fine in xp, it show's up in linux but it won't mount, i'm a linux noob, i've tried with the terminal and no joy, also when i try and boot from it it says "disk error press any key" now the weird thing is that it worked perfectly/mounted/booted without any problems for a while and now it just won't work. i have no idea what to do so any ideas are truly welcome, please remember that i am a noob and have no knowledge of shell at all apart from how to open the terminal and type in what others have shown me so please keep it simple.

thank you in advance

 

Hi kinkade,

I'd try a couple of things here:

1) Have you tried the stick on another Linux machine? If it works there then for sure it is your linux giving problems.

2) What linux you using? Usually the later linux versions like ubuntu should give no problems with USB ports.

3) Did you somehow mess with the BIOS on the nc4000? Sometimes the BIOS has a setting to detect USB drives. And if that's turned off, you won't be able to see your stick, even in linux.

 

he's using gOS which used to be based on Ubuntu, not sure if that's true anymore

 

hi guys, thanks for getting back to me, I am running gos 3 which is based on ubuntu 8.04, i have tried several drives in the laptop and none of them work so installed ubuntu on a desktop and the flash drive works just fine there. so on my laptop i can see the drive, it shows up in the file manager but i can't mount it.

all is correct in the bios.

so anyone got any ideas, i'd reinstall linux on my laptop but unfortunately it can only be done via usb as i don' have a floppy drive or a cd drive, aargh.

 

so why not just install ubuntu which works rather than a derivative?

 

I don't have a cd drive or floppy, i can only do installs via usb, so i have to get my usb flash driving before i can install anything. so i have to fix my usb before i can install anything else. i do have an internet connection though over LAN so if i can make use of that in anyway....

 

Format your stick to Fat32 on windows then download unetbootin:
http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html

With this tool you'll be able to use your flash drive as a live cd and install from it

 

Ok Ayle, thanks, i've now installed ubuntu but aargh i'm still getting the anvalid mount option message. i'd like to remind everyone that this usb drive did work on this laptop with linux installed and it still does work on other computers, anyone got any ideas?

 

ok so i worked out that it was trying to mount it as a cdrom drive and deleted that entry in fstab, now it works and i just have to work out how to set it to automount. thanks to all for the help.