Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Workaround for Knoppix 5.01 USB problem

PROBLEM:

Knoppix 5.01 as a live CD, booted live, worked fine for me as far as hardware recognition-- it could see my USB pen drives of mulitple manufacturers. Knoppix 5.01, after a HDD install to my computer, did not. It could not see any USB stick. Or rather, an icon would pop up on the screen, but I couldn't ever get to the stick.

DETECTIVE WORK:

One of the error messages is reported below:
"Could not mount device. The reported error was: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1."
Following the "dmesg" trail, I saw it was complaining about the UID that Knoppix assigned as owner of the stick. Then, I looked at /etc/fstab, both for a live boot and a HDD boot, and saw that they were identical when the pen drive was in. And that's the bug. The "UID" for the /sda1 was in both cases "knoppix". That's the correct userid for a live boot, but it was not the userid I had chosen for my HDD install.

WORKAROUND:

Create a userid of "knoppix" for your HDD install of 5.01, and you should have no problems seeing USB devices. I have reported this problem as Bug #10 at the knoppix wiki for 5.0.

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