Problem mounting a memory stick

[morrigan]

First, I should say I'm working in a university setting, and the two Linux RedHat computers I'm responsible for are meant for student use and abuse. They use them to work up data collected by analytical instruments.

I'm always after the students to back up their files. So, I added a memstick icon to the desktop (which I have since forgotten how I did that - can anyone refresh my memory?). I had hoped that the students would just be able to right click on the icon to mount and unmount their memory sticks (If I don't keep it as simple as possible, they will break something. Trust me.). However, I've noticed that some sticks work and some do not.

There is only one user account that we let the students use too.

Sometimes restarting the computer works. Other times, nope.

Any suggestions? I'm new to Linux, so I'm not really sure where to start.

Thanks in advance!

[morrigan]

Oops. I forgot - I get this error message:

Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
mount: /dev/sdb1 is not a valid block device

[Zelmo]

What may be happening is that the USB stick isn't always being assigned to /dev/sdb. You should be able to run dmesg in a terminal after plugging in a USB stick, and the last several lines will indicate what device node it has been assigned. If it isn't always the same (as may be the case when two different sticks are plugged in within a short time of each other), then you'll need a way to reference the devices other than their /dev/sd* node.

Udev was made exactly for this kind of thing. If you're running a 2.6-series kernel, check that you have udev installed. Then see if plugging in different USB sticks creates a symlink in /dev that consistently points to the right device. If so, use that symlink as the device node in your mount command. If not, check out this link for ideas on how to get udev to make the appropriate symlink.

If you're running a 2.4-series kernel, I don't know that there's a good way around the problem. The only thing that comes to mind is writing a script that tries to mount every /dev/sd* node in succession until one of them works, but that's messy.