USB drive is a CDROM drive and is not writable

[Kelvin Woods]

On Mon, January 8, 2007 03:48, Michael M. Press wrote:
> I have a 2 gigabyte USB memory stick from made by PNY. When I plug it
> in, I
> get the following:
>
> umass0: vendor 0x0930 USB Flash Memory, rev 2.00/2.00, addr 2
> da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
> da0: < USB Flash Memory 6.50> Removable Direct Access SCSI-0 device
> da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
> da0: 1901MB (3894975 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 242C)
> cd1 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 1
> cd1: < USB Flash Memory 6.50> Removable CD-ROM SCSI-0 device
> cd1: 40.000MB/s transfers
> cd1: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not
> present
>
> I want to be able to mount the device read-write, so I use the
> following command:
>
> mount -t cd9660 -o rw /dev/cd1 /media/flashdrv
>
> The command runs without spitting any errors at me, but it does a
> read-only
> mount. I can see files on the drive, but (of course) I can't change
> them. Does
> my problem have anything to do with the device being detected as a
> CD-ROM
> drive? If that is what's wrong I don't really know where to start
> looking to fix it.
> Any ideas?

This sounds like a "Smart" drive - can you confirm? It this is the
case it's designed to work this way. You won't be able to write to the
CD partition of this flash drive. Smart isn't supported under *nix so
the functionality it provides isn't available to FreeBSD users.

I have one of these devices myself and simply removed the Smart
partition to reclaim the space it takes up.

-- 
Kelvin