My pen drive crashes my computer!

[greenpenguin]

When I plug in my pen drive (an Integral 128Mb one that says it's Linux compatible) my computer either:
a) freezes untill I power off
b) i can

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/rem

as root, but when I try to copy anthing to/from it does a) or says I/O error and decides the device doesn't exist

Oh, and the mouse will only go sideways if b) happens.

Please help, my floppy drive is dysfunctional too, so my pen drive is my only way to transfer files!

[greenpenguin]

If it helps, I had this prob with Mandrake 10.1 now with 2005 (10.2).

Please help!

[Cabhan]

Take a look here:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/topic-41723.html

See if that solution helps at all.

[greenpenguin]

Pretty much do that anyway.

It sorted itself out for a while strangely

I'll try adding it to my fstab, see if it helps...

[greenpenguin]

nope, it's gone strange again

i've tried Ubuntu too and that freezes when I put the drive in.

I've found out that by disabling hald and hotplug and doing

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/rem

I can get it to work a bit, but my mouse still will only go sideways.

Does anyone know if it might be a hardware prob?

[bigtomrodney]

Do you have a read-only switch on the side of the pen-drive?

On an old key I had when read only was turned on it did pretty strange things like not mounting, registering as a different partition (sda2 instead of sda1 etc) or sometime just not responding at all.

[greenpenguin]

It does have a readonly swith, but I've never used it - its set to read/write.

There is one strance feature: It functions as a floppy drive and a pen drive.

I've recently installed SUSE 9.2 (Free version) onto my computer. The pen drive still makes computer freeze.

I have also tried using a SUSE 9.2 live CD on a different computer, and the drive didn't crash the computer. It didn't auto-mount the pen drive section, but it recognised it, and the floppy drive worked straight off.

Please help!